Working with levels

[burns]

Besides in the help section is there a handbook or study guide that gives a good explanation or demo on using levels in mastercam v8.

[Michael Reynolds]

What do you need to know?

Mike R.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

In a nutshell levels are a convenient way to manage entities in your Mastercam file. You can get as basic or as elaborate as you want. For example, the way I use them is like this;

Level 1-9 imported original geometry. So If I recieved a DWG or IGES, or anything, I set them on these levels. Level 10 Solid Body(Part). Levels 11-19 Contours, Surfaces, points, etc.... related to the part's first Operation. Level 21 - 29Contours, Surfaces, points, etc.... related to the part's second operation, so on and so forth. Fixtures for first Operation go on levels 111-119, Fixtures for first Operation go on levels 121-129, so on and so forth.

It helps me tremendously to organize my data. Label, Label, Label. Did I say label? Very important aspect. Even though I know what is on various levels I still label them because you never know what may happen. I may get fired/layed off/ even die or I may leave the company and somebody may need to go look at my files and if they are a mish mash hodge podge of undecipherable crap then it's of little use to anybody. Operations manager is the same way. Use groups to organize. I group them by setup operations on the part. I try to organize my Mastercam file so them even a novice Mastercam user can go into one of my files and have something usable.

JM2C