First of all, let us define the word “pocket”.  When it comes to SimCam, a pocket is an area with defined borders where material should be cut away. What can be confusing about the term pocket is that the border can be completely or partly outside the material making them invisible to the final part.

 

Let's look at some examples that are all considered pocket operations in SimCam:

 

Common closed pocket. All borders inside the workpiece.

 

Open pocket with one border outside of the workpiece.

 

Open pocket with no visible borders on the workpiece. Even though the finished part has no resemblance to something like a “pocket”, the pocketing function was used in SimCam.

 

Closed pocket with one island.

 

Open pocket with no visible borders and one island.

 

Pockets can have more than one island and of course, you can combine pockets so that islands have inside pockets etc.

 

Part made with a combination of four pocket operations.

 

The layers for the above part looks like this:

 

As you can see, pockets are quite flexible even though they do not always look like pockets!