Layers in Edgecam

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Layers in Edgecam, when I was a planning engineer at Rolls Royce in 1971, the year they went bust and the government had to take-over, everything was done with a good old fashioned pencil.

The way that you could build up drawings was with the use of see through tracing paper. This meant that you could have different things on different sheets of tracing paper. For example one sheet could just be the dimensions. So when you layered them all on top of each other you could see the whole drawing. On the other hand if you wanted to be without the clutter of the dimensions you could remove that sheet.

Ok that said well that’s the principle of having Layers in Edgecam or any CAD system. You can put anything on any layer and then display the layers as and when you wish. If you just want to see your solid model and nothing else you can click show only on that layer and the model is all you will see.

You can see what a powerful tool this is when used right. Unfortunately when used wrong it can be very confusing.

When you are drawing (lines circles etc.) or you are extracting edges. Always be aware that this is going onto whatever is the active layer.

It is really easy to think that maybe you didn’t draw that line and it just disappeared (no this is CAD CAM not David Blaine). That line or extraction is just on a layer that is not turned on. It’s there, you just can’t see it till you turn it on.

It can be very difficult to find something if you don’t know what layer it’s on. So you try switching them all on, oh dear what a mess more clutter than a teenagers bedroom.

Ok so what you do is always use meaningful names for your layers. For example CLAMPS and if you have made containment boundaries I usually prefix the layer CONT and then the name TOP EDGE or whatever it is. I am sure you can work out your own system for this.