- [Instructor] Any part that you're going to machine
will start off as stock material,
which must be larger than the part that you want to machine.
This is so we can remove material from the stock
and end up with our finished part.
SOLIDWORKS CAM provides a number of different methods
to define that stock material.
Let's take a look.
We're going to click the stock manager button,
and bring up the stock manager toolbar.
There are a number of different options we have here.
First of all, we can select the material
that we're machining from.
We'll leave it at 6061 T4 aluminum alloy.
We can also define a box around our part
that represents the stock material prior to machining.
There are a number of different ways to do this.
For example, we can use the bounding box offset.
Which simply creates a geometry that's offset
from the surfaces of our part by a certain distance
in the X, Y and Z.
Or, we could extrude a sketch around our part
and that sketch defines the bounding material.
We can also import an STL file,
or we could use another solid model from SOLIDWORKS
to define the stock material
that our part will be machined from.