Let's use Our Experience Gained Over the Years With V4 to Start Correctly in V5
By Steve Hotchkiss, Training Manager, CENIT America/L&H Consultants

Designers designed parts with little or no thought as to how or if a part could be machined. In most cases when the NC programmer received a part to machine, his first action would have been to recreate some of the surfaces so that they could be machined. When asked by someone "What do you do?" and you said "Everything twice!" it was a true statement. V5 is a new approach to design, so let's not start out with bad methodology. I recently discovered at the latest V5R6 Manufacturing class if the feature looks like a hole, the designer wants a hole and the machinist needs to machine a hole, then please create it as a hole NOT A PAD or SHAFT. This will allow you to take full advantage of the strengths that VB macros can offer you during the creation of the NC program. You have all heard the saying "If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck & quacks like a duck, it is a duck". The same applies with CATIA V5. If you create a hole as a pattern, you can select the pattern from the feature tree. You CAN'T do that if the holes have been created as a Pad or Shaft and then subtracted from the part. We have a chance of doing the job correctly - ONCE. If people gave a little thought to the downstream applications at the start of the design process with good methodology, a tremendous amount of time and frustration would be saved.