Anilam 3300 posts

[greensc2]

Hello group:

We have 4 Anilam 3300 machines, and we do a fair amount of surfacing for our plastic injection molding operation. Our post somewhat works, but in order to create anything close to the type of smooth profile we need, we have to generate files that are bigger than a 3.5 floppy disk (1.44 Mb). After talking to our distributor, Services 4 Automation, it seems that our post may not be programmed to support the filtering properly (we do activate the filter, by the way), because even then we often have a diamond facet looking surface after the finish pass. The path look perfect on the screen (even when magnified), but when we perform the cut, the results are not as satisfying. Is anyone else having this problem? Did you solve it? Were did you get the post that worked? I have been waiting since 4/24/01 and I feel like this issue is not important. TIA for any input.

[KMaynard]

Didn't Steve Bhiel offer to look at your post? if it's an easy fix they may do it for free ..

Service4automation is usually good with stuff like that .. if it's a major rework then or he has to come out I'm sure he have to charge you.

[Mike Harrington from Macdac Eng.]

Just quick question... Did you change your cut tolerance? .001 is the default and works ok for most stuff. But when it comes to molds and fussy looking parts you should set that cut tolerance to .0001.

Mike

[RandyN]

We had a couple Anilam machines in our mold shop at one time, and had facet problems also, using Mastercam, CimLinc, and Pro/E for cutterpaths. Unless you can filter to arcs, you will have to use .0002 tolorance to get a decent parallel finish, which makes huge programs.

We ended up putting hard cards (hard drive on a card that plugs into an open slot on the motherboard) in them and networking them to be able to hold a decent size program.

Randy

[greensc2]

KMaynard: Yes, Steve was sent the information, but it has been almost a month now, and there hasn't been any followup on thier part to get back to me, whether to say that it can be done or if there is a charge. I am afraid that there are going to be induced charges regardless, due to the new IMS GUI post interface. I hope that I am misinformed/misinterpreting that from now on, after each upgrade, we as customers would have to pay a reseller to "rework" our posts to fit to the newest MasterCAM version.

CADCAMGuru: This cut tollerance, where is this? So far, I have these settings: Maximum points / spline: 3000; Maximum points / surface: 4000; Maximum # of entities for undelete: 15; Database allocation: 8000; Toolpath allocation: 30,000]. We changed the Maximum surface deviation in the tolernace section to 0.00005. Brought the Cordal deviation to 0.00001.

RandyN: Your idea interests me a great deal... I was wondering if this was possible, I never did like the DNC method (running on RS-232 is just too slow... now if I can get a 10 Mb LAN line in... please e-mail me so that we can discuss how you peformed this operation, if you do not mind.

[email protected]

TIA

Normand

 

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Normand,

Not all dealers charge to rework posts for new versions. Here's the skinny; generally, taking a Version 7 and usually Version 6 Posts into Version 8 is just a matter of running the "Uptxt.dll" C-Hook.

What you won't get taking a Version 7(or earlier) Post and using it in Version 8 are features specific to V8 (Sub Program Support) etc...

Some Version 5 and earlier Posts need modifications. It really depends on the post.

Generally they do not run as much as making one from scratch. Hope that helps.

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James Meyette