Who Are We?

[Brian]

As the Moldmaker, I did all the tool design.

That sounds like fun! Do you do the design work in MC, or do you have something else for CAD, and then CAM using MC?

[Leehound]

I have been using Mastercam since 1998, for both Cad and Cam.

[MIL-TFP-41]

Ok lets try this.

My name is James. Born in St. Louis, but moved to Idaho in 1973 at the ripe age of 3. Discovered machining as a second choice elective in my sophomore year of high school (1986) & have been in a shop in one form or another since. Managed to get an associates degree in machining in short order (2-1/2 semesters)...I tried to continue on to doing an mfg engineering degree but decided I like making chips too much to continue that path. Hindsight I should of done it as I only had a year left, but hindsight.

In 1989 or so I found myself in Ft Worth working for a tool & die shop. Learned that some Texans are cut throat mother fuckers who got really bitter at the new guy who started on day shift while they worked swings. Sabotaging setups was common. Leave a part in a manual lathe 4 jaw chuck and somehow in the morning the chuck would be loose (not the part in the chuck, the whole chuck attaching it to the spindle). That guy wound up getting killed in a car crash, so I learned that karma is real. Most of my time in that shop was spent on a Monarch C-10 lathe programed with Fanuc's FAPT. I also had a decent amount of time using Hurco's Ultimax II controls on a mill. Still one of the best conversational mill controllers I have ever seen. I stuck it out in that shop for 1-1/2 to 2 years before I decided that my home was in the mountains, so in the fall of 1991 I packed up my shit & found myself in northern Utah.

I started at my current gig way back then. In those days we had a couple of CNC lathes and one CNC mill. We also had a bunch of Bridgeport's with Bandit controllers on them. Yep, 70's tech in the 90's. The machines were surprisingly good and while not easy to program (pencil cam) they had a bunch of built in paths that you could use to pocket out a rectangle or circle. Bolt patterns? no, that was all done by a little math & a piece of paper.  It wasn't the most advanced place then, but it paid OK and I was working 4-10's which gave me tons of mountain time (mountain bikes and motorcycles and hikes, what else does a single guy need)

Somewhere in those early days we started with Mastercam 3.1. I didn't really start using it much till V4 after we picked up a couple of Matsuura machines. Then, in the mid-late 90's I started using CadKey. (probably 1998, as it was CadKey 98). At the time I thought that combination (CadKey and Mastercam) was the ultimate solution. Buildings were added to the shop, CadKey went the way of the dinosaurs & somewhere in 2003-2005 I picked up Solidworks. In 2003 we pick up our first "real" 5 axis machine, a Matsuura V-Max800 5 axis. Pretty amazing machine at the time & one hell of a scary on to cut your teeth on. Things started really growing then, lots of machines were added, including a early generation MAM72-63V with a 17 pallet pool. (Side note...don't ever buy a early generation anything, lots of missing options & other refinements) That was when I started working with CamPlete (2006?)

In 2011 I took a really big jump to western NY state, becoming an official mfg engineer. Jumped in and started using NX to program production parts that ran in the Philippines. Great learning experience, everything had to be documented, even the smallest detail to get over both the distance and language barrier. As improbable as it sounds, it works, and it works very well. Lots of complicated parts (typical tool package was 150+ tools). Also got to witness the durability of Okuma machines vs Doosan. Big difference back then. That company exposed me to thinking out of the box, while being contained in a box. Example....I took part in configuring a 100+ pallet FMS system. 5 horizontal mills, mix of brands between Doosan and Okuma. Hardware made by one company, software to control the thing developed by another. Basically 4 different languages all had to communicate for the thing to work properly. That was out of the box thinking. Problem is they kept you in a box at the same time. To this day it is the only place I have seen that still used "R" do describe an arc center vs I, J, K. Reason? Way back when they did a comparison and discovered that "R" took slightly less memory. Convincing them to change was like trying to convince a liberal arts major their pursuits are worthless. Between their reluctance to change and personal reasons, after a couple of years I decided to go back to the mountains of northern Utah. 

Which brings us to current day. I lost count of how many spindles we have anymore. Between lathes and mills, 100+. I get to play with them all to one extent or another. Robodrill, Matsuura, Doosan, DMG, Toshiba, Toyoda....the list goes on. Current duties are programming, developing tooling, time studies, purchasing, sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, I honestly don't mind what I do. While I used to make it a point to look at every CAD/CAM software on the market, anymore I decided the best is whatever I am using at the moment, so Mastercam and Solidworks it is.  Pay is still decent and I still get my mountain time...tho these days it does take me a lot longer to get the top.