cad/cam for tormach 1100

I am new at this, looking to buy a tormach 1100 what would be a good cad/cam? 30 years of manual machining, did own and run a '81 cnc lathe manual punched in the G-Codes. Albere PE and Spurt cam Im think will work. Any input would be helpful. (yes I still look for handwheels cranks on a CNC)

I've had a PCNC 1100 for 5 years or so now and use Alibre Expert for design and SprutCAM for the CAM. Sprut's come a long way in the past 5 years, but the manual still suffers a bit from the Russian translation. There are Sput tutorials on YouTube, one set by TormachLLC and the other by Dukes4Monny (the UK Sprut distributor). Were I you, I'd download the 30-day SprutCAM demo from Tormach and set aside a few days to go through the tutorials. That should be enough to tell you if SprutCAM's workflow is a good one for you.

Tormach is the USA distributor for SprutCAM and one of their on-staff engineers provides very good support.

Mike

Thank you for the info. I have been a manual machinist since 82, Mid 90s I did own a Lanuc cnc lathe had to MDI everything, huge machine, could swing 42" 20 hp. I learned real quick that those little things like - and . need to be in the right place.

renegade machine said:

Thank you for the info. I have been a manual machinist since 82, Mid 90s I did own a Lanuc cnc lathe had to MDI everything, huge machine, could swing 42" 20 hp. I learned real quick that those little things like - and . need to be in the right place.

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I think something you need to decide is if you want a draw / cam workflow or are you thinking about a draw / cam / hand edit the GCODE workflow.

There are a lot of operators who do a really great job at writing their own GCODE. More power to them, they can do some very impressive operations that way.

Myself, I am a draw / cam guy who really doesn't wish to learn too much GCODE. Knowing enough to be able to read the output and spot the trouble spot is one thing, writing a whole program from scratch is another.

The Alibre software is pretty straight forward and I think well worth the price charged by Tormach. I use Alibre for lots of things, and I use Autocad Inventor for most. Alibre is smaller, simpler, and gets things done. Inventor is bigger and more capable. It is also the program I spent a lot of time learning several years ago.

SprutCAM and I have a real love / hate relationship. The documentation is pretty horrible, and I spent many tens of hours learning to run it. I am now pretty good with it, but it still gives me fits on 3D stuff. I don't have a lot of experience with CAM software, so I am unable to compare it to anything for you. At this point, I know where many of the bugs are (for example, 2D contouring, setting the safe level doesn't work the first time. You have to go back and edit it twice for it to work!). It has quirks and bugs, some features are so poorly documented that even their support people (Tormach) don't know how to run them.

Having said that, it is not a very expensive program. Updates are daily from SprutCAM, though Tormach only releases updates to us once or twice a year as they need to test it out with their machines. I see it 'could' be an extremely useful program if they can fit and polish it. Once you know how to, for example, setup contouring operations and hole machining operations, it is straight forward to operate.

Among my biggest gripes with the software is that it has no 'undo' feature. If you change something, you are stuck with it. Delete something from your model, you are starting over!

My degree is in computer science, I have been programming computers since 1980, I have written operating systems and microcontrol systems for 30 years. If I had to, I can jump in and write GCODE by hand, I just don't want to! I say this because I am not a computer novice by any stretch.