Mastercam X4

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Mastercam X4

Westec 2009

Written by Derek Goodwin

Well, you guessed it, one of our first stops at Westec was the Mastercam booth. I counted at least 15 people wearing the white shirts with the Mastercam logo and overheard a sales person who had counted up 300 qualified leads by noon on Monday. There is no doubt about it, the present and future of machining Industry in the U.S. is all about multi axis, cell manufacturing and you had better have the CAM system to back it up.

The first thing you notice at the Mastercam display is that all of the sales people know their stuff, many of them do demos throughout the day. Two of the frontline people are Arlene Eliason of CAD/CAM Consulting in Anaheim (left) and Ruth Delisle from CNC Software, both of whom saved this reporter by salvaging his camera when he left it in the booth.

X4 Demos are going on throughout the day, this Lathe demonstration, conducted in Spanish attracted plenty of spectators.

Here are a few of the highlights for X4

Improvements to Lathe:

Better graphic icons for C and Y axis toolpaths
Multiple chain selection for grooving
Dwell on grooving
Separate feedrates for plunge, roughing and finishing on grooving
Tool inspection checkbox (optional stop allows you too inspect the groove and then restart the program)

Sorry folks, I didn't see any Mill/Turn improvements

Improvements to Mill:

Tree style 2D toolpaths, including Tool Holder definition (this is a big deal)
Fine finishing mode (point distribution makes for superb finishing on 3D toolpaths)
Dynamic Milling (constant chip load technology allows for ultra fast feedrates)

I ran into Mike Macarthur, national sales manager for Robb Jack corporation and he showed me some incredible video on his iphone of 1/2" diameter endmills cutting 1" deep at 75 inches per minute in 6Al4V titanium, using Dynamic milling, he has promised to forward some links and a presentation, so look for this in a future article.

I also took another look at Feature Based Milling (FBM) and Feature Based Drilling (FBD) these additions had left me under whelmed last year, but now that I look at it, why not use it for prototype parts on a Vertical Machine? sure, the toolpaths are not fully optimized, but you can program a part in about ten minutes, and it's the kind of part that job shops make day in and day out, it's fast and efficient and I'm going to give it another try.

All in all, my impression of X4 is that it is a timely release, not ground breaking or earth shattering, but an incremental improvement of the software tool. Would I pay maintenance for another year to upgrade? Absolutely yes.