Lathe and mill

[pip]

How are any of you setup to run Lathe and mill together in mastercam.

We have Mcamx2 level 3 and are thinking of purchasing the lathe option. Are you opening a lathe group, and then turning the object, then opening another group(mill) inside the same Mcam file. Or are you producing one file for turning and one file for milling. Our construction department will be designing and exporting solids to us in parasolid format, and we machine it from there. Also do you have to rotate the solids for turning or can you use a WCS? At the moment we use PEPS for the turning and Mastercam for the milling.

[Steve Biehl - Cimquest Inc]

pip, you can do it both ways. You would use the WCS system if you want one model with 2 machine groups. In fact Lathe has a WCS of World Z = Lathe Z so that is a quick way to orient most of your lathe wcs'

[Chris Rizzo]

is wcs supported in lathe now? i always perform an inital xform to get my parts in proper orientation for turing, then use plane changes for all the milling stuff. in past experience changing planes in lathe is a train wreck. world z = lathe z works good though

[Thee Dragracer1951]

Ialso do a lot of milling on turned parts. I do them in the same file. Different machine group.

Sometimes, I copy geometry to another level to get what I want. I've jsut discovered stock transfer and flip.

Regardless, I can usually get it done.

[DavidB]

That was one of the best things I liked going from V9 to X that you could have 1 file for the complete part.

I have the turning and milling ops all in the 1 MC file.

[LEV]

Yes, you do it in different machine groups.

 

One of the parts I was working on, I put everything in one file: lathe, mill & couple of tooling projects for the same part. And looks like MC didn't like it going back & forth from lathe to mill & back to lathe. Sometimes when I'm

in mill machine group, MC thinks I'm in lathe & didn't let me do any editing. MC crushed on me several times using this file.

Did anyone had anything like this or it just me?

 

Lev.

[LEV]

Sory. I forgot to say that I was using:

X2 MR2 SP1

Mill Level 3

Lathe level 1