What is the soft jaw designer?
The Soft Jaw Designer is a tool (separate add-on or feature) provided by CloudNC that helps you automatically create the CAD geometry for soft jaws (custom vise jaws) to hold your part securely. Essentially, given a part model and vise parameters, the Soft Jaw Designer will generate the negative imprint of the part or an optimized jaw shape so you can quickly manufacture those jaws.
It drastically cuts down the time to design workholding for tricky parts by automating the modeling of jaws that fit the part’s shape. CloudNC made this available for free download, which implies it’s a utility outside of CAM Assist’s core, but obviously complementary. In practice: you load your part, specify how you want to clamp it (orientation, grip surfaces, etc.), and the Soft Jaw Designer creates the jaw insert models (that you then CNC machine and put in your vise).
Why is the soft jaw designer important in CAM Assist?
Making soft jaws is a common but time-consuming task in machining – you have to design jaws that securely hold irregular parts without damaging them and allow machining access. Automating that saves on engineering time and ensures consistency. It can take an experienced machinist maybe 30-60 minutes to design a decent pair of soft jaws for a complex part; Soft Jaw Designer claims to do it in seconds, cutting on average 40 minutes from CAD to first cut. That’s pretty significant, especially for job shops where each job might need custom jaws. It matters for CAM Assist because once you have good jaws, you can incorporate them as fixtures (avoidance geometry) and let CAM Assist program confidently around them, with workholding security considerations. Essentially, it streamlines the whole manufacturing planning: CAM Assist does programming, Soft Jaw Designer does fixturing design. Also, by ensuring an optimized design, you might get better clamping (maybe it suggests the best areas to grip etc.), which ties into the workholding security setting – if you design jaws well (for “Excellent” security e.g., serrated), you can then tell CAM Assist it’s Excellent and get aggressive cutting safely. CloudNC providing this for free indicates they see it as a value-add to attract users or simply to push quicker adoption of their approach (because if workholding is solved, more parts qualify for CAM Assist automated programming).
Where do you find / adjust the soft jaw designer in CAM Assist?
You will find the soft jaw designer within your CAM package, in the drop down menu under the CAM Assist icon. In Fusion, it will be an option in the Manufacturing tab. In Mastercam and Siemens NX, it will be found in the CloudNC tab.
Note soft jaw designer is not yet available for Gibbscam.