sometimes in the mold industry threads are formed right in the mold and therefore have to be machined somehow. Picture a pill bottle and cap. that's a good example of internal and external threads that need cut right into the mold.

when our owner complained about the noise, I told him it was the sound of money and he showed up the next day with earplugs for everyone

I always select the tools one at a time. there could possibly be 2 tool #1's one in machine group1 and one in machine group2 but that doesn't happen very often here.

+1 John It would be a lot easier to get our owner to buy the right video card if mastercam just said "this is what you need". Right now I have to say, "I know it's invidia and cost a lot but it's not the right nvidia and that's why we are having problems."

quote: Extreme High Master Toolpath Engineering God So this is like CRASH of the Titans

my seat is actually pretty stable. Is it possible that there could be hardware issues with your setup?

It seems like they've been pretty tight lipped about what's coming out on this release. any hints?

I get the same thing alot. I've never sent the file to QC because once I regen the ops they are fine. I can usually tell when it's going to happen though because it gives me a bogus error while trying to regen an op after editing some parameters. for instance I may edit a drill depth in a drill op or a "stock to leave" in a hsm op and then hit OK and try to regen. It will then tell me "error regenerating operation". Then I save close mastercam. Reopen, call up the file again and all ops are dirty. But they will all regenerate just fine. I'm not sure how to send a problem like that to QC.

I tried out the ajx on 4140 and it was almost scary how fast that thing would run. chips were flying off like popcorn. I didn't buy it because the salesman told me not to take full width of cuts or convention mill with it. Which is what mastercams "rough paths" use to do. but I've been thinking about looking at it again with the new highspeed paths.

solid model your name and project it onto a 3d shape.

Yeah, they could call that path "highspeed sockinit"

quote: Add it to the RMB and then when it goes kablooey it doesn't matter. I tried that but my cursor got to heavy by the end of the day (carrying all of those icons around the whole day)

quote: Probally both i'm guessing I think this is probably a good description. And there's nothing wrong with seeing if other mastercam users are with you or not. Also it helps you to understand why it's not like you want it. sometimes when other people disagree and say I need mastercam to be just like it is not like you want it because.... It's a good forum overall.

On our 40 tapers we get a lot of chatter when we bury the cutter and especially if the path buries it and conventional mills. the new hsm roughing paths maintain a constant width of cutter and guarantee climb milling. The rapid moves may make the path just a little longer but if you factor in time spent changing inserts and the fact that the machine runs virtually unattended now it pays big dividends for us. also we used to run the machine at the feedrate that the cutter took in it's worst condition (which means about 50% of what it could run in optimum conditions) so it was a lot slower. and you can also factor in swinging arcs in corners too small for the cutter to go into rather than just crashing hard into them like the old paths did a lot. That's why I'm ga ga over them.

10) an auto-pilot feature for long weekends and monday mornings. But I want to be able to turn it back off so it looks like I'm needed.

quote: Mastercam solids work fine if you know how and when to use them I can always get done what I need to get done with mastercam solids, that is true. But I could always get done what I needed to get done with surfaces too. That doesn't make it "fine" just do-able.

Wow, Matt, you're right. I'm pretty discouraged right now. I've had video problems in the past. We picked this computer up at an auction a few months ago from a shop that went under and when I saw that it had a nvidia quadro I thought I was doing good. But I got it cheap enough that we still could be ok in buying a better card

I could not agree more. I've been really disappointed with Mastercam's solids. Mastercam has had and probably still has one of the best surface packages I've used in any system and that includes unigraphics, cimatron, and several others. Their cam system is also topnotch since the release of mr1. But the solids capability is dispicable. I've never used a system that turned a solid into a sheet body when removing a face. Or a solid modeler that could not move a face and maintain draft and fillets. The thing that brings me hope is that they have this capability in the parasolid kernel which is the same kernel that unigraphics, solidworks and several other reputable cad systems are using. But there doesn't seem to be any push to make their solids better. Maybe that's our fault for not demanding it.

non manifold means you are making one solid into two by slicing something off and leaving slivers of the original. try extruding with wall thickness twice as thick as necessary with the stock going outward. hth

quote: Take this into consideration. Maybe I´m saying poppycock. I didn't know they had poppycocks in Brazil

Watcher, thanks for the info. I figured it was probably a video card thing just not sure how to fix it. Gcode, I'm messing with those settings. They looked like they were set right. but I'm doing a little tweaking. I thought that the setting I changed earlier was a windows setting rather than an nvidia setting. but I'm not completely sure now.

it is Nvidia Quadro 280 Pci-e. And yes I believe these are the latest drivers.

I'm having problems with mastercam windows jumping from one monitor to another. This might be a windows setting problem. But when i have one window processing on the right. I go to the other window on the left monitor and the right window jumps over there too. when I first hooked up the second monitor I clicked a button that told the task bar to spread between the 2 monitors and now I can't find that button back that puts it on one monitor. Mcx-mr1 on xp-pro

You opened a file that you'd been working on for 2 days. And when it crashed after changing the WCS it overwrote the file that was saved?!?

I've started autosaving to a file that is called backup.mcx in a different folder. It autosaves every half hour. that works pretty good for me "most" of the time. Sorry to hear about your loss. that really leaves a lump in the gut. I also started using norton GoBack that would take you back to a point where you can get the old file again.