EdgeCAM is an industry leading CAM solution for all your production machining needs. Applications include prismatic and surface milling, complex multi-axis turning, mill/turning, rotary and multi-plane milling and family of parts machining. Innovative supporting solutions for a more productive and profitable machine shop are supplied. These include excellent toolpath simulation, a unique wizard approach to post processing, a comprehensive tooling database, intuitive and flexible machine tool communications and a web-enabled job management system.

Production Milling

EdgeCAM provides the production machine shop with a wide range of flexible milling cycles. Machining efficiency is maximised on simple and complex prismatic parts as well as those incorporating sculptured surface geometry. With EdgeCAM you get prismatic machining combined with powerful 3D solid and surface machining strategies, all in one complete solution.
 

Intelligent Roughing Cycle
EdgeCAM's advanced roughing cycle for the machining of both 2D and 3D areas can be applied to the complete model, providing consistent performance on all types of model. A laced or concentric strategy can be implemented with bottom to top intermediate slicing between levels. This intelligent cycle will automatically apply the most efficient approach move for each region of the model and create trochoidal moves to avoid full width cuts. The ability to define 3D stock reduces machining time by eliminating air cutting.

EdgeCAM's roughing cycle also incorporates rest roughing, where stock is automatically defined by the preceding roughing cycle, so the smaller tool only creates a toolpath in the areas that the larger tool could not access.

Profiling Cycle
EdgeCAM's unified profiling cycle allows you to generate toolpaths on 2D geometry, 3D surfaces and solids in one easy to use cycle. The main advantage to the user is a consistent interface and support for advanced features and functionalities in both 2D and 3D environments. This intelligent cycle offers cusp height and cut increment controls and excellent surface finish for both steep and shallow regions. Using integrated cutter radius compensation, the cutting side is determined and compensation calls generated automatically between multiple profiles and levels.

Highly effective controls can be used to determine the start and end positions for the profiling cycle. A full set of corner rounding strategies allows you to choose the most appropriate method for machining corners.

Prismatic Machining

EdgeCAM's prismatic machining functionality offers a comprehensive range of 2D machining cycles, helping you to maximise your productivity.

Facemill Cycle
This cycle optimises the use of facemill tooling and can be utilised on parts with planar features such as walls, bosses and other flat areas. The cycle allows you to define the area to be machined by selecting a boundary. Nested boundaries are supported, and resulting toolpaths are associative to their respective feature boundaries.

Thread Milling
Internal, external, single and multi-start threads are programmed to provide canned cycle support.

Hole Cycles
Drilling, reaming, boring and tapping cycles are all supported. EdgeCAM's ‘hole optimization' calculates the shortest path for machining a set of holes, reducing cycle times and machine travel to offer maximum productivity.

Surface Machining

Recent trends in component design have resulted in an increased need to incorporate complex shaped geometry in production machining. Previously, such requirements were limited to short run, or one-off machining environments such as the mold, die and prototyping industries. EdgeCAM offers a full range of surface machining functionality that can be used by the production machinist equally effectively to machine large quantity batches. Solid models are machined using innovative, reliable and gouge free cycles. Intelligent approach strategies provide improved surface finish while optimizing machining times and maximizing tool life. Adaptive leads and links ensure collision free entry and exit on and off the job.

Parallel Lace
Perhaps the most popular finishing cycle, Parallel Lace can be controlled by stepover, cusp height, cut increment and minimum and maximum angle of cut. This intelligent cycle takes parallel cuts along the part, and allows for optimum, climb or conventional approaches. Used in combination with profiling, a consistent surface finish can be maintained by defining the cut angle. This angle specifies where the strategies meet on sloping shapes.
The user can select an option to ignore external edges that prevents the tool from rolling over the edge of a pocket or boss. This is of benefit to many applications, and results in precisely defined edges on machined cavities and avoids the need to create boundaries.

Constant Cusp Finishing
This cycle generates a 3D toolpath that maintains a constant surface stepover from one pass to the next. It produces a toolpath that can be defined from a drive curve or boundary.

Projection Finishing
Projection machining is a method of finish machining a part according to its design. It applies the required surface finish and cut pattern quickly and easily over the whole model or discreet features.

EdgeCAM's Projection Finishing strategies allow

• A 2D toolpath to be projected onto a 3D surface
• A circular, radial, concentric or spiral pattern to be projected for finishing bosses or pockets
• A pair of flow curves to drive a lace toolpath along or across a surface

Pencil Milling and Rest Finishing
Pencil Milling and Rest Finishing cycles are used to clean up material remaining from a previous finishing cycle with a larger tool. Pencil Finishing executes this as a single pass along internal edges and intersections, whilst Rest Finishing consists of a series of passes and is typically used to machine internal radii.

Flat Land Finishing
This cycle automatically detects the flat areas on the model and applies a lacing or concentric clearance pattern on these areas. Combined with the Parallel Lace cycle for the machining of steep areas, it provides the most efficient strategy for the machining of free-form components, by ensuring that the most appropriate tooling is used for the machining of different areas of the model.

EdgeCAM's Flat Land Finishing cycle also incorporates rest machining that allows you to finish areas that have been left by a larger tool in a previous machining cycle.

Multi-Axis and Multi-Plane Machining

EdgeCAM supports the machining of holes, pockets and surfaces on different faces of the part. This reduces total setup time and fully exploits multi-axis machine capabilities.

EdgeCAM offers full support for multi-axis milling, including 4-axis rotary machining, 3-axis machining plus 2-axis simultaneous indexing and 5-axis machining for trimming, and de-flashing of single surfaces.

When machining multi-faced parts, or multiple parts mounted on a tombstone fixture, EdgeCAM can easily position to any face to allow full use of both prismatic and surface machining cycles. Machining sequences and toolpaths can be merged into a single sequence and rationalised by tool, index position or datum to produce an optimal program. EdgeCAM Simulator displays all the multi-axis and rotational multi-plane moves for realistic process simulation and collision checking.