Interview with Donald Dorsey, Business Development Manager, GibbsCAM at 3D systems

Sanjay Gangal interviewed Donald Dorsey, Business Development Manager, GibbsCAM, 3D systems at the 2019 SOLIDWORKS World Conference in Dallas, Texas.

SG: Tell us a little bit about GibbsCAM.

DD: GibbsCAM was one of the early CNC programming packages that came out in the modern age of CNC programming. We’ve been in the market for well over 35 years, we’ve always taken our approach of – we’re gonna look at the parts the way the machinist is gonna look at it. We want to look at it like a machinist would program a part and we’ve developed our software and our interface to take advantage of that, so we’re very friendly to the machinist environment so they know how to program the parts.

SG: How do you do the 3D Systems flow?

DD: 3D systems likes to consider themselves as an end to end software package portfolio. We have geo-Magic, which is a scanning software technology. We have our 3D Expert which is a file preparation for 3D printing. We have our regular 3D printing software, and then we also have GibbsCAM which is the subtractive manufacturing portion of our portfolio.

SG: Where do you fit in the overall manufacturing ecosystem?

DD: In the manufacturing ecosystem. We’ve been a Solidworks CAM partner since they started the program. Of course, many of our customers received Solidworks’ parts and we can import the Solidworks’ parts as well as anybody else can. We put tool path on them. And we also can actually re-import a Solidworks’ part if it changes and update our tool path automatically within the system.

SG: What are you showing here at Solidworks’ conference this year?

DD: Primarily this year, at Solidworks World we’re gonna be focusing on how we fit into the Solidworks ecosystem as I just talked about and we’re also going to be talking about some of the news features of GibbsCAM 13, which we have coming up for release very shortly here.

SG: Tell us about some of the new features.

DD: Some of the things we’ve worked on this year; we’ve been talking to our customers and the machine tool OEMs – about how they’re trying to address manufacturing more complex parts without getting into overly complex programming methods. What we did this year, some of the more beneficial enhancements, where we added whats called the elliptical turning and eccentric turning, which allow you to program the turn parts off center without having to get into excessively complicated programming.

SG: When is GC 13 coming out?

DD: GC 13 is in the final beta stage right now! We expect to release it, here, very shortly. I will be making announcement as soon as this out. So long as you’re following us, you’ll be able to see when it comes out.

SG: What makes GibbsCAM and 3D system solutions unique and differentiated in the market place?

DD: This goes back to our original focus of how GibbsCAM originally was developed, we developed for the machinist- by the machinist. What we really like to talk about is, our ease of use, how long it takes to get someone up and running with GibbsCAM from the starting point. Several systems can take weeks, months, or even years to fully be adapted to the system. With GibbsCAM – many of our users get up to speed in the matter of days; use it to program parts right away, we have ready made post processors so they can get cutting on the machine as soon as they learn to program the part.

SG: What is the best ways for people to find out more about GibbsCAM on the internet?

DD: Best way is www.3dsystems.com/gibbscam. We have plenty of information, we have customer stories, free trial, and all sorts of information about different options.

Tags: 3D Systems, CAM, GibbsCAM, manufacturing, SolidWorks

Category: Interview

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 2nd, 2019 at 14:44. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.