Another WCS question

[Thee Dragracer1951]

OK...I'm trying to change my ways and do things right instead of the quick and dirty way I been gettin it done...

I have some mills and lathes.

Mill WCS stuff I can mostly figure out.

How in the heck do I get the lathe Z, dia WCS to work.

I have some geometry done after I was doing a mill part. Call a new file to create the geometry. Oops...WCS is still mill. How do I change it to lathe?

When I analyze something, I get X,Y,Z instead of Z,Dia.

What am I doing wrong?

[Rick Henrickson 65]

did you change your machine type?

[DavidSV]

On the bottom, click planes>Lathe Diameter>+D+Z

[Thee Dragracer1951]

Oh Crap....it was under planes and I was thinking (!) WCS....

Thanks guys.

[Chris Rizzo]

One BIG thing to remember is the WCS does NOT work in lathe. Always pre plan and have your part oriented so when you are in top wcs, and hit top gview it looks like it should on the lathe. Then when you have your milling machine ops going you can use the wcs again.

[Thee Dragracer1951]

You know Chris, I read this yesterday and it just hit me what you are talking about.

Many times I just whip up a little geometry to run lathe. But I'm doing more and more parts that are three and four op milled and turned parts. I'll have to get in that habit.

Thanks for the tip.

[kennebec]

Are you all succesfully combining Mills and Lathes in 1 MCX file, I have not had a lot of luck with that, I save my files with Job number L or M (Lathe or Mill)

 

Thanks

[Bryan Johnson]

quote:

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Always pre plan and have your part oriented so when you are in top wcs, and hit top gview it looks like it should on the lathe.

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As long as I follow the above rule, I do not have any problems with miltiple mill/lathe machine groups in a single file.

[kennebec]

Thanks Bryan, I will pre plan and see how it works out.

[Mike S @ S4A]

additional thoughts on multi machines:

certainly best to align the model "lathe friendly" then do the milling off custom planes.

put the lathe def at top in ops mgr ,then the mill. If done right, your lathe stock definition will drive verify right on down thru the mill...

We've got several sample files we present in training that illustrate the concept successfully.

A couple warnings:

Keep track of where the red arrow of doom is!!

that will influence which toolpath product is dominant.

Lathe and Mill play together nice. Wire machines do wierd things in the ops mgr and ultimately corrupt the file....gotta couple bugs logged on this front.