Programming with the Tapmatic RDT25

[jaymac.z28]

I'm fairly new to mastercam x6 router, so I have a few questions regarding tapping with the tapmatic attachment. I usually machine wood, but my company wants me to drill and tap a few hundred M4x.7 holes in 6mm thick extruded aluminum. I've manually created a subprogram for taping one hole with the tapmatic, and just call it for each hole I need to tap. This works fine, but it will take forever to write a program that calls the same subprogram for over a hundred holes. So far I've used the boring cycle in mastercam to select the holes for drilling, but since the tapmatic requires a specific retract rate to engage the reverse gear, I can't use the same G85 boring cycle as I do for drilling the hole. I've tried many different things to accomplish what I need to do, but have had no luck. I basically want to use a subprogram for tapping when I select all the holes in mastercam. My machine us using a fanuc controller if this helps. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[mkd]

you can turn off canned cycles in your control definition which will give you long-hand code (go1). might be a pain to edit.

 

there are also ways to do a custom drill cycle which will give you exactly what you are looking for posted from master cam.

[Mgrenier]

Or you could use modal macro call (G66 for Fanuc). We use it a lot and it works great. Not a big difference from regular cnned cycle.