Toolpath Time???

[Lee.]

I am working on a part that seems to be taking way too long to get toolpath. I am running a 2600+ AMD Athlon, Asus A7V8X Motherboard, and a 32Meg Nvidia card. Mastercam seems to everything really well up until the staus bar says " Creating tool boundaries at **** certain depths, depending on the satrt depth. Any ideas???

[MATT Q]

What type of toolpath are you trying to write? How much RAM do you have allocated to Mastercam in your system settings? Try bumping that up if it isn't already.

[Lee.]

Anykind seems to give me greif. I have one toolpath with 0.1 stepdown and one with 0.02 stepdown, seems to be same hangup.

 

Ram on system, 523,808 Kb

 

Mcam settings

32767

6000

1000

100,000

100,000

 

Thanks in advance, Lee.

[cadcam]

Lee waht are you cutting. We need to have more info.

Are you cutting a mold cavity with 100,000 surfaces

[Scott Bond]

Lee K. White

Keep posting info, we'll figure it out.

[TREV]

quote:

 

I have one toolpath with 0.1 stepdown and one with 0.02 stepdown, seems to be same hangup.

 

__________________________________________________

 

that scenario would put your tool at the same z level , just one path will take 5 steps to get there .i have found that some times a surface could hang a regen at certain levels . you may want to change your step by something as little as.0002.this has made a world of difference for me at times.

hth,

trevor

[Lee.]

The part is approximately 5 feet by three feet and all I am trying to do is pocket and finish approximately 90 holes that are about 2 1/2" diameter with a draft angle on the sides. The part is .75 thick and the holes go through.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[Lee.]

Hey Trev, I am running separate toolpaths with different step downs. Not at the same time.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[Scott Bond]

Are you useing the simple pocket feasture with the known tapper angle on your tapper tool?

Or are you useing a surfaceing feature ?

If the tool tapper and the surface tapper match, some times we have a problem because computing can stall on a zero computation.

[Lee.]

I'm using surfacing toolpaths. Sometimes with a straight cutter, sometimes a ballnose cutter.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[robk]

Is the hangup in regenerating or backploting?

If backploting than select endpoints in your display options.

 

Rob

[Lee.]

It doesn't hang up, but is very slow at the point mentioned above.

 

It happens in regen and fresh paths.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[Scott Bond]

By any chance;; are there radii on the surfaces that are exactly the same size as the radii on the ball mill?

[Midwest]

_______________________________________________

I'm using surfacing toolpaths. Sometimes with a straight cutter, sometimes a ballnose cutter.

_______________________________________________

 

Try analyze surfaces you may have a bad surface.

[Lee.]

Hey Scott, There are no radii on the surfaces, I am letting the ball mill leave me one but mastercam is not wary of this.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[Lee.]

HELP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[MATT Q]

Can you post that file to the ftp site?? So we can play with it.

[TREV]

lee,

+10 to what matt said.

also is the holes in question all the same and is the taper uniform? if so why not cut just 1 hole using a 2-d contour with taper walls option,the translate that single op to desired locations. if allthe holes are spaced evenly it should be a breeze.

we could really help more if you could make the file available.

trevor

[Lee.]

I would like to, could you please tell me how?

 

Thanks, Lee.

[cadcam]

Lee use the link at the top of this page that says FTP Upload Instructations.

this will tell waht to do to get to my FTP.

[TREV]

lee,

i created a file that is similar to what your looking for and put it on the ftp called "for lee.mc9" (hopefully you are using v9)this file took less than 5 min to draw and lay a tool path.let us know if it helps.

 

oh yea use the zipped file it is a smidge smaller . sorry jay i got carried away and did not zip it first time

hth, trevor

[Lee.]

Hi Jay, I put the file called cadcam.zip in the mc9 files folder.

 

Thanks for all your help.

 

Please try regen on any of the operations and let me know how you make out.

 

Thanks, Lee.

[Müřlıń®]

Yo, Lee.......the crunch time seems about right for the param have selected in ops.

 

All the toolpaths that you have chosen to do could be done much more easily in 2-d.

 

Alot faster too....but....

 

 

If you want to do this in 3-d using surface toolpaths, I would suggest you save just the surfaces on another file. Just use the solids for creating your geometry.

 

When you choose all those surfaces and boses on surface/rough/pocket Mastercam has to look at all those. So I would only choose the geometry you actually need to machine.

 

Change the color of all the pockets that you want to machine to a diffrent color.

 

When define your pockets for ops, just pick the color for your pockets and use surface/rough/pocket/paralell spiral....no clean corners.

 

Be sure to set the retract height to clear all the bosses sticking up.

 

Also you want to use the depth limits with the minimum to the top of your pocket and the max to the bottom.

 

I would only use your tapered endmill for doing a finish contour on the inside of pockets and outside of bosses.

 

 

My .02

 

Good luck

 

Murlin

[SledGeek]

I agree Murlin. I used the 2-d taper path like Trev mentioned, translated that over to remaining holes and it worked great.The rest can be done in 2-d as well.

At a glance there are other ways to do it that are quicker to process than surface pocket.

[crazy^millman]

Well lee you could be doing a part i just got doen with. It was about 45 mb model file and when it was all said it doen between both side I ended up with 150 mb of toolpaths. I had to abondand one tool cruch I figured it was going to take about 1100 hours with surface/finish/scallop I left Friday about 5:00 pm went in Saturday about 3 and it had only figured about .250 of a 10.00 in part in that time so you do the math. I had to give up quality to get the part done but would have love ot have done it that way. You have greta epople helping you out on this problem and they have giving you greta adivce and direction. If going to get inot more complex stuff would go to 1 gig of memeory and get at least a p4 processor never heard any good things about the Athlon processors but maybe one of the other computer guys can tell you different. Good luck.

 

Crazy Millman