Nesting problems

[Brentwooten]

I need help with mastercam nesting: for example I have two squares and a triangle to I want to fit in a sheet. And all the parts will not fit, but if I could adjust the triangle manually (possibly by adjusting the angle or something) or just being able to pick the part and drag it where I need to. Any help would be greatly appreciate. By the way I have mastercam 8 if that makes a difference.

[thereclinerman]

did you set the size actual size of the sheet your are using in nesting? i cannot bring up mastercam at home because i left the dongle at work. however, off the top of my head, on the second tab in nesting on the left side, there is a step option that lets mastercan try to fit the parts by steping the angle. you could try nesting only one square and the triangle and then see if there is enough room to drag the triangle to another spot and then delete the original and copy the second square. also, in the main screen in mastercam, before nesting or toolpathing, you can draw the size of the sheet and then create your parts, move them inside the sheet, and rotate them as necessary. make sure u leave enough room between them to toolpath. you can email me at [email protected] if u need more help.

[Brentwooten]

Ok thanks Jim, I'll try that tommorow. I have another question if u don't mind. Say I have 5 parts in my nest and I send it to my cnc, and I let it run all night. I come in the next morning and it alarmed out for coolant or power went off or any reason the machine stopped. How can I go into mastercam, in my best, and skip those parts that completed. But I need to leave my uncut parts where they were originally nested and keep my original offset. I heard of people "ghosting" parts? Not sure if that's what u would call it, but I need some way of restarting without restarting the whole sheet. I know u can open the g code up in notepad or something and delete out everything above where it stopped, but I am just a beginner at using g code and would rather wait a little while when I get a little more experience for that.

[Colin Gilchrist]

When you perform a "Nest", you are placing copies of the geometry on your sheet. I'm assuming you go and add toolpaths afterwards. When you create a "Contour" operation for example, you will add "Chains" to the operation. Once the operation has been generated, you can go back into the "Chain Manager", and remove the chains you've already cut, then regenerate the toolpath and repost a new program.

 

When you perform a Nest, you added "Chained parts" or "Chained clusters" to a sheet. Once you add the chain you want to nest, you should set the "step angle" so that the nesting algorithm can rotate the geometry for a "best fit" onto your sheet.

 

In any case, if the nest is performed, it will show a "results" dialog box. There are some tools that let you manually grab the chains and move them around manually on the nest. It will respect the part-to-part distance, and you can use some keys on the keyboard to manually rotate the nested chain while you place it. It works slick for optimizing your nesting results...

[cncchipmaker]

Ok thanks Jim, I'll try that tommorow. I have another question if u don't mind. Say I have 5 parts in my nest and I send it to my cnc, and I let it run all night. I come in the next morning and it alarmed out for coolant or power went off or any reason the machine stopped. How can I go into mastercam, in my best, and skip those parts that completed. But I need to leave my uncut parts where they were originally nested and keep my original offset. I heard of people "ghosting" parts? Not sure if that's what u would call it, but I need some way of restarting without restarting the whole sheet. I know u can open the g code up in notepad or something and delete out everything above where it stopped, but I am just a beginner at using g code and would rather wait a little while when I get a little more experience for that.

To skip parts in your program would be a little bit easier than rewriting a whole program I think. We cut alot of stainless here at work and if we happen to break a tool, lets say on the last pass of a contour cut we use this procedure: Start at the beginning of your program and 'single block' it all the way through letting it go to the 1st XY and let it read the tool length offset move, G43H1Z(whatever). Hit "edit" and scroll to the next point where your next XY where your part was starting. Put your machine back in "memory" and then hit "cycle start. It would be easy to do if you set up your part start postions with line numbers like N100, N200, and so forth that way it would be easy to find. Typically we will save about an hour of run time by doing it this way. If it takes 25 minutes to cut a slot and you have 3 passes and you break a tool on the last pass time really adds up quickly if you have to start from the beggining. This example is done on a Makino, fanuc control.