Design Engineering – May-June 2019

May/June | 2019 http://www.design-engineering.com

14

I

n an ideal world, CAD software would

love CAM software. After all, the whole

point of designing things is so they can

be made. In the real world, though, CAD

and CAM don’t get on that well. While

today’s MCAD software usually recog-

nizes that the output of its designs is for

manufacturing, drawings produced for

BIM and civil projects do not.

Prepping for manufacturing isn’t nec-

essarily innate to the CAD software we

use. We see our job as done when we send

the drawing to a plotter or a PDF file. We

can draw the entire solar system at 1:

scale, right down to the lettering on a lunar

lander’s plaque (as an early AutoCAD

sample drawing showed), but most CAD

programs can’t prepare the drawing to

manufacture the plaque.

The gulf between CAD and CAM exists

because CAD works with mathematical

certainty. We designers take pride in our

consistent use of tools that are precise, as

CAD vendors reassuringly remind us. We

place geometry using object snaps and

parametric constraints, accurate to 14

decimals places.

CAD is so precise, in fact, that CAM

Although CAD and CAM grew up together, they still don’t play well, despite industry’s best attempts.

By Ralph Grabowski

OF MANUFACTURABILITY

THE PROBLEM

CADReport

operators can’t work with the drawings

we produce. That’s because CAM factors

in the real-world problem of tolerance, a

fancy word meaning “uncertainty”. It’s

these plus-or-minus dimensions, on the

order of 0.01mm or more, that come into

play due to the imprecision inherent in

lathes running in machine shops, or the

gears and hydraulics of graders guided by

GPS while smoothing freeway expansion

projects.

As a result, CAM operators need to

tweak CAD drawings. This is one of the

major benefits of software like SpaceClaim

and BricsCAD. The direct editing found

in these programs allows machine shop

operators to import models from “any”

CAD system, and then adjust the drawings

to suit CNC (computer numeric controlled)

output, such as removing unneeded details

(defeaturing) and extracting geometry for

fixtures and tooling.

Most of us CAD users were never

trained in manufacturability and so we

have no idea about it. Manufacturability

is the extra information that ought to be

included in CAD drawings so that parts

can be manufactured without CAM oper-

ators needing to massage our output. For

example, steel molds require mild draft

angles so that plastic parts pop out easily.

Sometimes molds also need extra pipes to

deliver additional molten plastic to fill the

mold properly. When the flanges of sheet

metal are bent, allowance must be made

for the bend radius, known as the k-factor

(or y-factor in PTC software).

For instance, AutoCAD, Microsta-

tion and nearly all other CAD programs

are ignorant that wood cut for kitchen

cupboards needs to account for the

width of the cutting blade or to nest the

parts to minimize waste. Nesting places

parts optimally on plywood or sheet

metal to minimize waste. Regular CAD

doesn’t do this.

How the Split Occurred

The disconnect between CAD and CAM

didn’t always exist. The first CAD systems,

developed by McDonnell Douglas (Uni-

graphics, now NX from Siemens) and

Dassault Aviation (now Dassault Syste-

mes), purposely output to CAM.

However, most of the systems that

followed were developed differently. CAD

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