Soft Jaw Designer for Mastercam

The Soft Jaw Designer is feature of the CloudNC CAM Assist for Mastercam add-on.

Soft jaws are a type of workholding device used in CNC machining processes where a delicate grip (or complex shape) is required. They are typically made of a softer material than ‘hard jaws’, such as aluminum or mild steel.

The CloudNC ‘Soft Jaw Designer’ feature uses built-in ‘intelligence’ to efficiently design customized fixtures for your part.

The Soft Jaw Designer is smart enough to create clearance allowances for sharp corners, avoid interlocking geometry, and enables your part to be positioned securely from multiple directions.

The Soft Jaw Designer can be used to design jaws from:

Automatically generated pair of cuboids.
Existing pair of jaw stock bodies.

Overview

Before you can use the Soft Jaw Designer, you must have opened a part/model in Mastercam.

To use the Soft Jaws Designer, take the following steps

Open a model/part in Mastercam.
Open the Soft Jaw Designer from the CloudNC Ribbon.
Configure the parameters for the soft jaw design (for details, see Soft Jaw Designer - Step-by-Step).
Click the green checkmark button to create the Soft Jaws.
The jaw bodies will be created in a new level named ‘Soft Jaws.’

The Soft Jaws level may not be visible immediately after running the Soft Jaw Designer.