Chain sorting and direction

[Jeremy Grigsby Excelsior Marking]

We are doing some lettering for a tire mold. I'm having trouble chaining the entities in one direction. What I'm saying is that it is picking up and skipping a few letters and then going back to get them in unwanted sequences. How do I get them to chain in a one way order where it doesnt skip entities. We just started using MCam in September, and we have mill level 3. We have been tooling in Smartcam, and it wil sort them right, but we are trying to go to mastercam totally. I know theres a way, but I'm not all that familiar yet.

[McRae]

Smartcam did have a nicer sort and optimization module than mastercam. I have yet to find something its equal and considering that that package is out of develoment for the last 5 years - when is Mastercam going to catch up?

[Surface]

Jeremy,

I'm guessing that you are chaining via a window. I do quite a bit of engraving and the only way that I have found to do it is to either manually chain the entites or a faster method is to reverse/reorder by the operations-manager geometry dialog box. Although the latter method sometimes bogs down my computer when several hundred chains are involved. In that case, I chain as two separate operations.

I wish there was a more reliable method as well. I have thrown away some good parts because I did not catch a reversed chain in time.

good luck

[Surface]

And while we are on the subject, open contours are a pain to find when using the engrave modual. I wish there were a way to change color/level of open contours.

[Jeremy Grigsby Excelsior Marking]

Well, we didn't get the engraving package. Does it have alot of useful feature? Thats basically what we do at this company, but we were around 25,000 dollars with the seats we got and didn't really want to go much more. Is the engraving package worth the money?

[Fig sign]

Try use the pocket job uncheck the rough and run only finish.

NO need to change direction of chains

[Jean-Simon]

Hi Jeremy, in the chaining options you have some check boxes that could probably help you out like: directions for closed chains and reverse directions of inner chains or nested chains sorting.

Hope it helps!

Simon

[Surface]

The engrave module is really nice. It forms closed contours into a 3-axis contour, with an engraving tool, so that the letters don't look so 2 dimensional. It has all the features one would expect from MC, depth cuts, depth control, and pocket routine....

Like lots of things, once you have access to it, you don't know how you lived without it.