Delcam donates £100,000 in training to UK users

Delcam has donated over £100,000 to its UK customers in the form of free training vouchers given to all attendees at its latest series of user meetings. The meetings were held in Bolton, Hampshire and at the company’s Birmingham headquarters, with the Birmingham meeting proving so popular that a second day had to be added to cope with the high demand. Overall, more than 300 customers registered for the meetings.

Commenting on the offer of free training, Delcam UK General Manager Steve Creron said, "We realise that many of our customers have had a difficult time over the last twelve months so we wanted to do something to show how much we appreciate their loyalty. At the same time, we have introduced many new enhancements to our software recently and felt it was important to encourage our users to have the extra training they need to make the most of these new features.”

Delegates to the meetings had their first opportunity to see the new release of Delcam’s PowerSHAPE CAD software. The 2010 version incorporates greatly enhanced solid modelling capabilities, alongside the unrivalled surface modelling capabilities developed over more than 30 years. The combination of the two technologies provides a powerful solution for designers that undertake conceptual design with PowerSHAPE and for toolmakers that use imported data extensively for tooling design.

Another highlight was the new release of the award-winning PowerMILL CAM system, which offers the fastest-ever toolpath generation on multi-processor computers, giving greatly increased user productivity. This incorporates the latest background-processing and multi-threading technologies and so uses the full power of recent hardware developments to reduce calculation times and increase output dramatically. Other enhancements to further improve productivity include reduced memory usage when programming the largest and most complex parts, and improved ordering to give faster cycle times on the machine tool.

Delegates were also shown enhancements across the complete range of functionality in the 2010 release of the FeatureCAM feature-based machining system. Like the latest PowerMILL release, this incorporates support for multi-threading when generating 3D toolpaths. A number of innovative new programming options were demonstrated, including combined drilling and milling functionality that allows more efficient hole creation on machines fitted with automatic tool changing. This generates roughing and finishing toolpaths to produce any holes for which the appropriate drill is not loaded, using the existing tooling within the machine’s crib.

The sessions were completed with demonstrations of the 2010 version of the PowerINSPECT inspection software, which offers even easier inspection of parts, tooling and prototypes against CAD data. Enhancements include easier creation and editing of inspection sequences, extended ‘simple measures’ functionality, an improved and simplified GD&T Wizard and more flexible simulation of the inspection sequence.