Thanks that means a lot to me, I do have a passion for metal work but, I also want to hit the ground running in this career and make shop management one day. I know I don't want to limits myself to just one machine I was told it was a choice machine to know how to run and to add to the list of experiences. As far as the jokes I understand their just kidding around and don't mean anything by it. thanks again, I appreciate the advice too.

thanks chris, appreciate it a lot. So I guess the okuma lathe rumor was just a rumor, a source told me it was the choice lathe for high accuracy work or somthing like that and the controls made it harder to find a good operator/programmer. Hence the guys who knew okuma had btter pay/job security or somthing. I appologize for the stupid questions but I'm just a student here, I got my first 5 hours of official mastercam training just yesterday.

Well I'm a bit confused about the post processors I came to the conclusion they existed for each "dialect" of G-code. This is correct right? Now heres my follow-up question what machines use the non-default post processors? is there a list floating around somewhere? I specifically interested in the Okuma lathe (assume the default) processor, Haas processor (also assume the default) and an ancient daewoo. P.S. is it true the guys who work with Okumas get more respect in the industry?

First I got to say I've learned quite a bit from this forum in the time I've been here and I really appreciate the wealth of knowledge and help I have gotten here. Anyway I've done some stuff on wintopo and made about 20-30 aluminum plates with pocketing and contouring mostley a couple with some full profile cutting. I guess this would be classified as "2 axis" work. I decided to take it a step further and do some true 3D work with a hemisphere. I'm having a lot of trouble with 3D surfaces. I started making a 90 deg. arc and rotating it into a hemisphere from there I tried to do some surface roughing but the best I could do was contouring. What am I missing here?

Cadcam, its real funny you mentioned that I was actually there about 6 months ago and took a quick tour on a weekday night during a mastercam class. I wanted to attend NTMA but it was a toss-up between the north hollywood campus and the norwalk, I either had to cross the 405 north into the valley or the 10east/5 south. Both of them seemed good to me but, the 405 into the valley can be a 3-4 hour commute so I went to norwalk. I'm about 2 months away from graduating the basic machining course right now.

whoops, the forum name should have appeared "machinistkid" well better for me to make a typo here than a Z offset, lol. I'm going to give wintopo freeware version a shot, thanks.

Hi I suppose a quick intro is in order, I'm a 20 year old student in los angles CA about a couple of weeks ago I got a chance to play with mastercam 9.1 anyway I'm having a lot of fun but I am not taking any mastercam courses and I do not have the oppourtunity to do so, I have been teaching myself bit by bit here in my free time so please bear with me if my questions are just plain ignorant. My question: Is it possible to convert a windows picture file like a BMP/JPEG/GIF into an entity or series of points? Do I need third party software to pull this off?(I have MC 9.1)Can a throw the pic in the backround and "hand-map" the points? Thanks for being patient with me. -Aaron