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Drilling in solids

Drilling in solids

Drilling in solids

(OP)
I am new at Surfcam and pretty much left to my own devices. My problem is that I import a parasolid object and try to NC drill the holes in it. When Surfcam asks me to pick the holes and I point at it Surfcam does not recognize the hole! Frustrated, need help!
Thanks

RE: Drilling in solids

Hydropress,
I assume by now you have solution, but I thought I'd post an answer for any new Surfcam users with the same problem.

I started with Surfcam 99 and I am currently using Surfcam 2002 build 222.

Surfcam will only consider a point, arc or circle as a pickable entity for drilling.

You can create wireframe data directy from the parasolid import box - if you're lucky this will give you (2) arcs at the top of each hole, but usually your parasolid will import as nurb spline wireframe.

Recently my parasolids are coming into surfcam as one single 360 degree arc. I'm not sure if this was due to a new build of Surfcam I installed or our recent update to I-DEAS 9 m2. Whatever the case, it makes it easy to take advantage of Surfcam's recently added feature - masking by diameter range (this only shows up when your drilling).
 
Basically, without circles on the tops it is a pain to drill when you have a bunch of holes. I used to manually create a point in the center of one of the two arcs for each hole or create a circle from 3 points on the nurb spline so that I could mask by colored point or circle - especially before the new hole wizard when you had to repick every hole for every operation.
I would really like to see Surfware add some more powerful data healing & conversion utilities.

RE: Drilling in solids

One minor correction and an additonal remark.  Arcs are not viable selection entities when drilling a hole.  The reason you are now receiving full circles from SURFCAM SOLIDS is because the translator from SOLIDS to SURFCAM has been re-written to analyze the acrs and make them one entity.  The Parasolids Kernel doesn't like allowing acrs to wrap back around onto themselves, so it splits them up.  SURFCAM has elected to sew (If you will) the surfaces and arcs together, making for easier selection of holes.

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