most difficult type of machining? On Mastercam

[TomT]

Could anyone tell me by your own experiences, which type of machining is the most difficult to perform on Mastercam? Production, molds, aircraft parts....lathe, mill, Wire EDM....which one is the hardest? I really don't know because I only work on Mastercam for molds, and only on milling, I don't know if it's hard on lathe to program?how about production? must be a well organized tool library and operation manager, with notes for every operation? a lots of questions....for me, just P20 for material, no tool changer...copper with electrodes...a lots more to learn. I think

hope to hear from all of you

[Andy]

Lathe 8 is a dream. I absolutely love it.

Great improvement over Lathe 7.

We work with alot of different materials in Mill and feeds and speeds get challenging at times. We have a different library for every material and that makes for a lot of tools but it works very well.

The most challenging CAD we do is when we spline a free digitized curve and then machine it and then have the customer vary it slightly. We end up tweaking the curve and attempt to get tangency in the geometry for a smooth machined curve. Of course, in our case, this is 2D. I imagine in 3D this would be even tougher.

But it is all fun and challenging.

Andy

[ngkim]

Tom T,

i wonder how you would machine an electrode with a flat endmill using flowline or surface contour especially for sharp flats that tapers.i mean we can't use ball nose cutters.everytime i use a flat cutter MC WILL SAY CUTTER CANNOT HAVE NEGATIVE STOCK VALUE.

[cadcam]

Ngkim,

There is two ways one is telling it is a smaller cutter or my way is to scale it in most cases .003 for over burn.

TomT,

I would say believe it or not are panels or chases with about several hundreds to thousands of holes & pockets along with bosses.

Like you said lots of tools and vary time consuming.

[ 09-07-2001: Message edited by: cadcam ]

[bryan.davis]

cheat, tell mastercam you are using a bull nose cutter, but put a VERY small tip radius on it, this often satisfies the conditions for routines than can only use a bull or ball nose cutter, but the tip radius is no small that the fact thatyou are using a square cutter makes no difference.

Besides after the setter has dropped the cutter you may find that putting a tip radius on it may more accurately define the cutters shape anyway

[cadcam]

bryan ,

Are you suggesting Lying?

Oh!! how could you say cheat mastercam so you can get what you want.

I never.

[Scott Bond]

Hi

"Could anyone tell me by your own experiences, which type of machining is the most difficult to perform on Mastercam? "

"Any machineing with no air-conditioning."

[ 09-08-2001: Message edited by: Scott Bond ]

[TomT]

Ngkim

Why not "negative stock value"? I always use nagative stock value for electrode, depends on the habit of the polisher! use bull nose- very small radius or if your tapper is smaller than 15 degree, use tapper end mill, you'll have better finishing on the electrodes.

Tom T

[ngkim]

In reply to Mr. Bryan Davis and Tom T,by using a very small radius as in bull nose cutter(eg dia 6mm radius 0.005 mm),put in negative stock value(eg -0.1 for spark gap of 0.1/side)mastercam will return the same old "Negative stock magnitude cannot exceed than tool corner radius."warning!wondered whether have you all tried it first?and you can't even regen the toolpath with such parameters!As for Mr.Cadcam's suggestion of scaling the part to the spark gap's burnt area,i can't seem to get the part's dimensions correct to the actual reduced size!ie.xform,scale etc..may i know how it is done?

[camguy]

I think this negative stock issue has been covered before, but to recap:

scaling will NOT give a true part. for example, create a cube 2.0 x 2.0 x 4.0 high, create a point at the bottom of the cube in the center, and scale all lines about the point by 90 percent. the length and width will be 1.8, and the height will be 3.6!

If you want to cut negative .1 on the electrode, you must have a cutter with a radius of .1, or larger. if you lie about the cutter rad. and use a square corner on the tool, you will over cut the stock.

the only option that will work correctly is to offset all the surfaces on the electrode negative .1, and cut to zero stock. This may result in cleaning up the offset surfaces as you may have small gaps and/or overlaps.

Hope this is of some help to you.

[cadcam]

Well dame then all the molds i made with eletords over the years have been no good.

Ya right.

your way will work and mine has to.

and there are even better ways on top of this.