Looking for some suggestions

[TERRYH]

I am currently working on a part that is a large tall alum. casting, I had to play with my tool lengths and safe Z's to keep everything within the Z travel I had left after the part height from the machine Z travel. I had the part complete and needed to change a couple holders because our tool room guy could not find them that were not in use, when I did that and changed the safe Z it blitzed some of the stock models and programs that were below it. When I tried to reprocess them the stock models would not reprocess, I even tried to create new ones to no avail. Talking to our other programmer he said he does them by creating a STL, importing them into MC to a level and then uses them to create his stock models from, this way he said if you change something above the stock model used it does not blitz out the programs afterwards. well I tried it this way and when I was running it in verify it looked like it was cutting thru a skin like it was hollow and everywhere it cut you could see inside the part, not sure if this is correct and I can trust it or if something is wrong and there is another way to do it, because it seems stock models will only process up to a certain point then they do not work any more for us. it would be nice to change something and not screw up several programs afterwards. all help and suggestions are appreciated in advance. 

[jwvt88]

There's a lot to touch on here, but I believe your fastest solution lies within exporting the stock model from Mastercam, rather than the Simulator/Verify. That fixed this issue for me. 

The issue of your stock models not working, in my experience just means they're too big(which also means they're taking too long to calculate). You can resolve this by either loosening tolerances, or breaking them up. I use a lot of rest machining referencing stock models so I don't have this issue too much, but once you feel its taking too long to crunch a stock model, just create a new one, and reference your previous stock model in the new one. The biggest issue with this method is if you have to go back and edit something you're stuck re crunching a bunch of rest pathing and stock models again,  but that's just part of it in MC I guess. 

[crazy^millman]

You need to do the pmesh wash as we have come to call it. Bring the STL into the Mastercam file. Make a stock model out of it and then convert the Stock model to a PMesh to a different level. Go back and clear the STL as the original selection and now pick the pmesh. Now it works most of the time, but not all of the time with the standard settings. Sometimes we have to kick the tolerance up in the stock model to #1 make it smaller to manger and #2 to make it water tight. Now you can delete the original STL to reduce file size.

[TERRYH]

sure would be nice if this simply worked as it should without all these work arounds. it seems if they do work properly on smaller parts and simple parts but when you get into some of the larger parts like we do duel cavity carpet molds of vehicles nothing works as it should. thanks for the suggestions guys I;ll add them to my list of things to try.  

[jwvt88]

I agree, but I just think that MC should give an option when importing an STL to make it a mesh or not, it would save a lot of hassle. I've seen some similar things in the past in other softwares, but its generally due to file size, not like this. 

[crazy^millman]

1 hour ago, TERRYH said:

sure would be nice if this simply worked as it should without all these work arounds. it seems if they do work properly on smaller parts and simple parts but when you get into some of the larger parts like we do duel cavity carpet molds of vehicles nothing works as it should. thanks for the suggestions guys I;ll add them to my list of things to try.  

I understand, but for most of the Manufacturing Industrial big models and parts is just not the normal scope of work. We have helped Mastercam improve in this arena so much in the last 5 years it is amazing how much better can so work with big files than before. I would break some files into 10 files before now I may only break into 2 or 3. Stock model and STL is still one of those hit or miss things and even doing reverse engineering with STL for Special effects and cartoons is one thing, but for Manufacturing still a long way to go in my humble opinion. We need tools we need mesh controls, filtering, slicing and crop capabilities. I tell anyone doing larger files to seriously think about investing in Verisurf Reverse. I wish they offered a light version for dealing with Stock model and handling STL files like this, but after using it a few times for your more complex parts I think the ROI of 6-9 months in time savings is acceptable to most companies looking for ways to help deal with this.

[TERRYH]

I would guess 90% or more of our work is very large parts 1 or 2 offs and some of it gets pretty detailed for it's size. Not saying anything bad about our re sellers as they are very helpful and try their best to find answer's for us, but when they cant figure it out and send an issue on to cnc software it seems to be gone and never heard from again. Our company owner has looked at other software to replace MC in the past and we convinced him it was best to stick with what we have rather than go thru that transition and find out it's actually no better, but with all the work arounds and added work and steps to get done what we need to  it gets very over whelming sometimes.

[Guest]

What version of mastercam are you using? There might be a solution, I have seen cnc software say they have a chook project thay deals with pmesh/stl stuff, it might do what you want.

[jwvt88]

1 hour ago, TERRYH said:

I would guess 90% or more of our work is very large parts 1 or 2 offs and some of it gets pretty detailed for it's size. Not saying anything bad about our re sellers as they are very helpful and try their best to find answer's for us, but when they cant figure it out and send an issue on to cnc software it seems to be gone and never heard from again. Our company owner has looked at other software to replace MC in the past and we convinced him it was best to stick with what we have rather than go thru that transition and find out it's actually no better, but with all the work arounds and added work and steps to get done what we need to  it gets very over whelming sometimes.

Really hard to say man, as transitioning software is always a big and time consuming hurdle. What I CAN say in my (albiet limited) 9 month experience in MC, that if I was given a die shoe/post or an injection mold cavity to program in MC(my previous experience is in med/large molds like bedliner or bathtub, and class A dies, like hoods, doors, fenders), I would be  overwhelmed. MC in my opinion seems to excel in the area where my present company is using it, where we have a lot of time to dial in toolpaths to shave literally seconds off parts. If we have a 3 minute production part we can shave a few seconds off of them then the bosses are happier(big deal when you have 100k or a million parts to run) and this is something that would be much harder to do in other software I think just because there is limited manipulation of programming(They dumb it down and make it a lot more user friendly). But on something like a mold or die where a few minutes isn't a huge deal, I could save literally days of programming in other software. I could do 6 shoes with posts per shift, it's scary to think how long it would take me in MC.  

I would say sticking with MC would be wise if your company is at a limited growth rate or stable. If you are rapidly growing and hiring a lot of people(think double the size in roughly 5 years), I think looking into other software could be a reasonable option as it would enable you to hire an expert in that software to ease the pains. If you stick with MC, it could be worth it to maybe hire a contractor for a few months to come in and really try to standardize your systems and set you up for success. If the company was already considering other software then an expense like this shouldn't be overwhelming. 

[TERRYH]

6 hours ago, peter~ said:

What version of mastercam are you using? There might be a solution, I have seen cnc software say they have a chook project thay deals with pmesh/stl stuff, it might do what you want.

2019 for the most part, and 2020 some but we found a bug in 2020 when doing our larger parts and sent it up the chain supposed to be addressed. 

[Guest]

4 hours ago, TERRYH said:

2019 for the most part, and 2020 some but we found a bug in 2020 when doing our larger parts and sent it up the chain supposed to be addressed. 

Hmm, ok, I will open a ticket to obtain  the project once my current tickets are concluded, I have been wanting to explore stock model functionality,if and when I come up with something I will notify you.