Rotary positioning-C-plane problems

[Smit]

Hi all,

I have an elliptical part that I need to drill 54 holes in from a rotary table. I imported the part as an iges file from Pro-E, so all the holes came out as splines. I drew lines parallel to the hole center, then attempted to draw arcs normal to those lines, by using the cplane, normal option. After a few holes the c-plane would stop changing numbers. It would remain for ex. on 18. The arc would appear on the screen to be correct. I saved the geometry, exited to do something else, then returned to the file. When I opened it the arcs that I created after the c-plane quit changing were all piled at the bottom of the drawing. I ended up having to draw a few arcs, save and exit, reopen the file and draw a few more, etc until I had the part drawn correctly. The part is completed now, but for future reference I'm wondering if anybody else has run across this phenomenon. Or maybe somebody knows why this happened and how it can be corrected. It made the job much more difficult than it should have been.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Larry

P.S. I'm using Version 8.1.1

[Glenn Bouman]

I have not seen that problem.

 

If you had V9 with solids, you would read in the file, convert to a solid. Solid Drill would then identify all the holes along with the correct plane, hole depth, diameter and generate the program.

 

Very automatic.

[ProductDevelopmentGuy]

Dont forget you can also use Modify/CnvtoArcs to convert any or all circular splines to arcs and circles. That'd give you center points and normals quickly.

 

PDG

[Smit]

I've heard that Version 9 will create solids from a surface model. Hopefully soon I'll have the upgrade. Until then I'll have to do it the harder way. I tried to convert splines to arcs, but with the curvature of the splines (I believe that must be why) Mastercam won't do it. I get the message no splines converted.

[P_Scott]

Larry,

 

Whenever you create a new Cplane that is not associated with any of the default Cplanes (1-8), you should Save the Cplane and name it something for future reference. The alternative is to create Edge Curves from any surfaces. This creates splines which can be converted to arcs and also retain their 3D coordinates. Edge Curves can be constructed from the Create-Curve menu in Mcam. They are separate entities from the surfaces so I always place them on a different level and color to distinguish them from surfaces. HTH