Drill cycles missing

[tmalinski]

All Drill cycles are not available in the tool library Parameters page!!!

I was wondering why Mastercam V9.0 Mill does not show all of the available drill cycles in the drop down list on the parameters page in our tool library. When creating or editing tools in the tool library apparently the cycles drop down list has been hard-coded to eight. However, when you edit “Parameters” in the Operations manager on the second page, the “Cycles” pull down list shows all available (we have 10 defined). This requires us to manually edit the cycle after we “get tool from library” in our Op manager. Wouldn’t you know that the Peck Boring cycle #9 is widely used and we miss it!

Has anybody else noticed this or are we unique with 10 cycles?

Does anybody have a suggestion for a fix or reliable workaround? Is it possible to Re-Order and while were at it Re-Name the cycles somewhere within the various text files that Mastercam uses? Maybe the post would have to be modified also? If I can Re-Order the most commonly used cycles starting at the top, cycles #9 & #10 wouldn’t be missed too much

 

Thanks, Tom.......

[P_Scott]

tmalinski,

 

Welcome to the forum. The drill operation cycles you are referring to in the tool library are the most common cycles available in almost all CNC controls. The reason the cycle list is not as long as the one you see when selecting a drill operation in Mastercam is because the drill ops in Mcam are post processor specific. That's why the tool library won't display all the cycles, because not all the posts support the same cycles. Someone else who has a machine that doesn't support the cycle you use frequently, may mistakenly think that cycle is available in their post if it's seen in the parameters for a tool. My advice is to create your own tool library and select your post as a default in the system configuration. When you start a new job, call in the tools from your custom library, and make sure the post you use is selected, from the Job Setup. HTH

 

[ 02-20-2003, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: Peter Scott ]

[tmalinski]

Thank you for your response Pete,

In response to your advise, we have been using our own custom tool library and Post for a while now and they are set as default in the cfg file. It was while we were building our tool library that we came across this issue. If I understand you correctly, the cycles available in the tool library are generic, while the cycles available in MC are Post specific. This makes sense and certainly supports my findings, but I would think this should be an “out of the box” installed configuration and that if a user creates his own tool library while a custom post is current, the library’s tool parameters would reflect any cycles that are specific to that post! In my case here is a simple scenario. I get a tool from any library, make edits to the params (select cycle # 10), I save the MC9 file and all is fine. Then I go to “Job Setup” and hit the “Tools” button. It shows me all the tools in use for that job! Then I highlight a tool and RB “Save to library”. At this point I fully expect the cycle chosen for the job to be saved with the tool in our custom library. Isn’t that what a custom library is for? Mastercam does not warn me that it will assign its own cycle, or that the one I think is being saved is actually lost.

Don’t misunderstand me, I think by and large Mastercam is a great product it certainly runs circles around our old nc software, but back to my original issue, How can I fix this? Once our library is complete there will be little if any editing of tools from that point foreword. Are there not placeholders in the tool library database for the cycle name and parameter values? Is it possible to manually edit our custom tool library by saving it as text and then plugging cycle 9 or 10 into it with its params values? Then I would re-create the library from text.

 

Thanks, Tom…….

[P_Scott]

Tom,

 

I see what you're getting at. I don't know if there is a way to save those custom cycles with the tool parameters. My guess is there was a couple of paths Mastercam could've gone with this and they decided to provide generic cycles in the tool parameters but allow post specific cycles in the operation. You're right. Mastercam is the best all-around CAM software on the market but there are still some things that could use improvement. Nothing is perfect. One of the greatest things about Mastercam is that it's one of those few software companies that actually listens to client feedback and does something about it. Talk to your reseller about this issue. Good Luck.