Re: Giving up on Vector CADCAM .. alternatives?

Alan,
There is a lot to be said for separating CAD from CAM. Almost no one has the intellectual or financial backing to do a good job on both. If you are using ACE I suspect that right now all you need is 2.5D CAM. I recommend the following:

- If Autocad works for you can stick with it. If not use Alibre's free parametric CAD program. It really is full featured and even does assembly modeling. Tutorials are pretty good and price can't be beat.

- For CAM try Sheetcam. Its the simplest most capable 2.5D CAM that I have found. Try the free demo which will import your existing Autocad DXF's and if it works the full version is around $150.

I haven't researched full 3D multi-axis CAM in a while. I use VisualMill which will do about anything but is around $3500.

Roger

> I've been struggling with the dreadful documentation provided when I purchased version 11 of Vector CADCAM (clearly written for an earlier .. and different .. version of the program). I upgraded to version 12 in the spring, hoping that some better docs might be forthcoming.