[yamo18]

Originally Posted by Billfred

Yes, but Pro/E can also be a machinist's worst nightmare. Our final project for EMCH 111 was a jewelry box, which we had to take all the way from a four-page sheet of instructions to a finished piece of wax, complete with engraving on the top. As I (foolishly, in retrospect) did eight lines of text in script font, my code went to about 11,000 lines. (When I took the floppy over to the machine shop, it was at first met with shouts of disbelief unfit to repeat, followed by a request for a night or two to go through the code with a beverage. I later found out that it took three of them.)

By the time the little green button was pushed on my particular jewelry box, about a thousand lines of code had been cut, and some portions were rewritten. Apparently, Pro/E was outputting some oddball instructions, like telling the machine to cut without having the bit below the surface of the workpiece.

Moral of the story? Newfangled technology is fun, but it's always important to get your code examined by a Person Who Knows What They Are Doing before giving it a go.

(By the way, to complete the story, I was supposed to come in a couple of days later in the afternoon to actually run this thing. It turns out that he went ahead and ran the code before I arrived just to find out what the heck I had written. In addition to starting a running gag with the machine shop, I received an A for the project. I haven't CNCed anything since.)

well that can happen with any CAM software. Just have to make sure you use the correct postprocessor for the machine you are using. The lab I work in at school, spent a good few weeks getting Pro/E to postprocess properly to run on the machines we have in the student machining lab. It looks like we will be doing the same thing this summer with CATIA.