Today is a New Dawn

Today I become an official member of the Inventor HSM community. As everyone who knows me is aware my primary purpose in doing this is to acquire a CAM program that is straight forward and intuitive to learn and use and also has if not best in class tool paths certainly up there with the best. One that would not cripple my days with hard to implement strategies that quite frankly cost far more time than they could have ever saved me. One that worked without complications out of the box. One that generated tool paths that saved me time and money both in creation and execution on the mill.

My interest in HSM is not new and they were the ones I wanted to be integrated with SE to begin with.
https://solidedging.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/solidworks-and-hsm-works-and-why-not-hsm-edge/

I have watched in my friends shop for over three years how well HSM has worked on a tremendous variety of parts. I have watched in the last year or so with envy as I struggled with CAMWorks for SE to get much done in an expeditious way. I am tremendously happy to finally be with a program that I desired to use some time back. My big holdup had been lack of integration with SE and I was not interested in buying SW just to get HSM.

Today my values on integration have changed. I have through this most painful experience with CW4SE determined that a great CAM program that is not integrated with SE is far better than an integrated CAM program that is but does not work at all as billed. Yes I would like it if HSM was integrated with SE and it would be a near utopian scenario as far as I am concerned. I doubt highly that this will happen though and lack of integration is the least of my worries after this past year of grief with Geometric.

Geometric did a pretty good job of promising things and had a good-looking program to begin with. Since I was one of the ones really pushing to see CAM integrated with SE I was also morally obligated to support this when it did finally happen. This I did not mind since the promise for the future at that time looked pretty darned good. Alas the promise was not the same as what was delivered and I finally had all I could take of this situation.

There is a differing philosophy between HSM and Geometric. HSM has sought out real machinist input for years and actually incorporates it into the software. Oh, and they fix the problems that do on occasion arise quickly from what I have seen. Geometric on the other hand does what they want how they want and the mess they deliver has a very slight resemblance to the desires of actual machinists. Problems linger for years at Geometric and judging by what has gone on this last half-year they don’t much care if you like what they produce.

There are a lot of “I’s” in this post today. Normally I (there – go again) think it is bad form to sound like Obama and use I every other word. In this case though it is my money, my company, my bottom line and my future. So I am writing this purely from my perspective.

I am glad this Geometric chapter of my life is over and I look forward to working with people who actually care about my profitability and efficiency.

12-29-14 UPDATE
Please see 12-29-14 post for an update on this. I have pulled most of my critical comments in hopes Geometric is finally serious about fixing things. This one stays though as it reflects the differing groups these CAM prgrams are currently direct towards. CW4SE for big companies and Inventor HSM for small companies that need to do things quick and easy.