Re: [rp-ml] DWG to IGES

From: Caleb at Chinook Sailing Products (purchasing@chinooksailing.com)
Date: Sat Mar 24 2007 - 00:58:31 EET


Al,

Don't be too surprised - DWG is not a very good format. Not very many non-Autodesk programs will read the ACIS solid bodies inside .dwg & there are mesh size limititations compared to STL. As for STL, it is great if you are doing simple surface machining, but mesh won't drive any kind of profiling or drilling or many other common CNC operations. All that said, IGES doesn't look quite so bad being that it contains many types of entities, is still fairly well supported both on the CAD & CAM end. I prefer STEP when dealing with 3D solids. As for translation I'm a Rhino cheerleader so I have a rather biased opinion. It seems a waste considering Rhino's powerful toolset, but I've heard of folks buying Rhino mainly for the translation capabilities, & it cost lot less than Inventor upgrade(less than $900.00). You can DL an evaluation & do 20 translations free ....

HTH

-Caleb Walker
-Purchasing/Product Development
-Phone (541) 374-5005
-Chinook Sailing Products
-HiFly America

-
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Al Hastbacka
  To: RP-ML
  Sent: Friday, March 23, 2007 1:34 PM
  Subject: [rp-ml] DWG to IGES

  In the process of sending several DWG files to CNC machine shops, we found that many of the shops did not seem to be able to use their CNC machines with anything other than IGES. Is there a simple way of converting DWG to IGES without spending $5K for an AutoCad upgrade to Inventor.

  We were really suprized that many of the CNC machine shops appear to be in the dark ages when it comes to interfacing STL or 3D DXF files.

  REL

  PS

  Are there any machine shops on the list that can interface with an STL file more directly?



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Tue Jan 01 2008 - 18:13:03 EET