Cams For All, I Don’t Think So.

This area of Inventor would have to have been the biggest let down I have experienced from spending money on software in along time.

The mechanism in the image was my second drawing using Inventor’s Cam function after it was released.  It is representative of a design done many years ago as a modification to a horizontal toggle press. It is also something that I have wanted for a long time to include in my CAD training, it will make a great complete  modelling exercise and would have been all the better if it could have been animated as well.

Now we always have had alternatives that have let me and others draw mechanisms but Inventor we were told was a Mechanical engineering design package so right from the first release we wondered where was this capability and when we got it aaaaaaaaaaaah!

The schematic worked, great lets move on and make a real model; not so fast.  In short the ‘CAM’ function in Inventor could not go much past this schematic and will not work on all schematics either.

Our next and slightly different model exhibited some very nasty tendencies that would render any attempted analysis of a mechanism not possible, extremely difficult or at the very least frustrating.

I raised these issues with Autodesk directly shortly after the first release of Inventor 5 and in return have received only rudeness, silence, Inventor 5.3 and Inventor 6 with exactly the same problems. It is now nearly eighteen months since we got the function and it has not earned a penny?  It should be fixed as a function, dropped into Mechanical Desktop and like ‘sheet metal’ development in MDT it would enhance what we already have and use to design, solve and draught these types of problems**.

I close with a question;

I would like to ask if Carol Bartz, CEO of Autodesk, bought a new car, picked it up from the dealership and arrived home only to find out that it was going no further. Eighteen months later, after repeated calls to the dealership she still had a car, in which the engine would run but the car would not move, in her driveway, would she calmly wander off to study engineering or learn motor mechanic skills, fix her car and then politely phone or email to tell the car dealer and manufacturer how she did it, enabling them visit all other owners in the same position as she was, fix their cars and charge for the service? And would she buy another vehicle, or anything else, from that dealer or car manufacturer?  Would the dealer and manufacturers CEO be surprised that she did not become a repeat customer?  Indeed would they as 'responsible' CEOs have let it get so out of hand before bringing downward pressure on their staff to rectify her problems and ensure she became a repeat customer?
 

Think about it, what are you paying for…………………………?
 

R. Paul Waddington
cadWest.

P.S.

** Remember in CAD profitability comes from productivity which come from ‘FLEXIBILITY’.  If the importance of ‘FLEXIBILITY’ continues to be ignored then neither profitability nor productivity can exist and therefore there is no reason at all for any of us or our customers to continue to buy products like Inventor or its competitors.  AutoCAD and products like it will take another several generations into design and draughting without any great problems.  After all, CAD doesn’t think or create it is you the user who has the intelligence and CAD is just one tool of many that enables you to express your creativity.  The moment CAD makes this job more difficult or causes you to compromise, because of it, it should be shut down and disposed of!