Follow up question, is there any tricks to force the tool to exit the cut periodically? 

The tool inspection is awesome but my tool is in the cut for the first 90% of the toolpath. As soon as it comes out of the cut to loop back around it retracts for a tool inspect, but by then it's been in the cut for 50min of the 60min total.

I think I may be trying to find that elusive easy button here.

My first thought was to use two separate dynamic mill ops. Both would create a retract after every pass allowing the tool inspect to happen at any of these retracts. The biggest thing I don't like is exiting and entering the cut every single cut, I'd rather do it every 5 or 10 passes than every one. Please see dropbox pictures

Dropbox Dynamic Motion Pics

Man you guys are quick in the morning. Thanks for the responses. Exactly what I was looking for.

I kept searching "tool check" instead of "tool inspection" that explains why I couldn't find it.

I seem to remember reading something about this but can't remember the specifics. 

I have a 2D Dynamic toolpath running for over an hour, every 15 minutes I'd like to stop the machine to clear chips and check the tool, then reenter the cut where I left off. The only way I can think to do this is chop up my dynamic mill op into 4 separate ops and force tool change each op. Is there a way to do this automatically so I don't need to create multiple ops and new wireframe for each?

My post is a slightly modified MPFAN. MC2023

10 minutes ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

Jake - Feel free to give me a call, as this sort of thing is easier to explain on the phone, but basically, it's really hard to create a perfect toolpath that will utilize 100% of all available processors.  Really hard.   Keep in mind that a highway at 100% utilization is a grid-lock....

Stock models are a great example of something that can't really be multithreaded effectively.  You have to take one toolpath and step through it to see material removed.   One step at at time.  There are some tricks being played when there's logical sections that can be established, but you always have to balance something like that with how much effort to spend pre-processing to see what can be split up vs. just getting through the work.

At the end of the day, clock speed is still king for a lot of this sort of stuff. 

Funny, I was just reading one of your responses from 2020 - https://www.emastercam.com/forums/topic/100265-nvme-drive/

Any chance you could PM me contact info? I tried to PM you but it said you couldn't receive messages. I'd love to have a conversation on this topic.

2 minutes ago, crazy^millman said:

With that kind of logic have the put in Cell systems to leverage 100% up time on the machines? Do they have redundant pallets and use parent child tools on the machine? Let me guess they show up to the INDY care race in a 1962 VW bug and wonder why they don't even qualify for the race. Not leveraging what you have means they lack a true understanding of what computers do and how they work. Does every machine in your shop running 100% spindle load 100% of the time? You are falling short if you are not with this stupid logic. If that tap is not using 100% spindle load every time you are tapping the you have failed as machinist in their eyes. Do they drive their cars at max RPM through all gears and make sure they are driving at 200 mph every where they go? No way just an excuse to penny pinch due to their lack of understanding and making up ways to do it.

This right here reminds me why I am not a good employee. I went out and bought my own system at the last 5 machine shops I worked in. I showed the owners I was willing to put my money where my mouth was. Think any of the gave me a bonus for making them more money than they were ever making? No way no how, but I know what is the right way to do my job and if needed a tool I bought it. I still have over $40k of Precision hand tools. I sold $40k of tools those last 5 shops because I had better tools than they did. Takes money to make money and sit down and figure out how much time each programmer is wasting in a day waiting. Then multiply it by 5. That is how much profit the company is losing not getting better systems. My answer to them would be the following as I walked out the door. You want to throw away money fine, but don't come complain to me when we have to close the doors because you kept making lame excuses. Will it be night and day different now, but better systems for the programmers is money in the bank plain and simple.

I loved reading every word of this response, thank you for this. 

What's a good load range for a computer? above or below 50%? We run some of our machines at 90% load consistently, but you won't see me running a car at 90% of it's RPM.

12 minutes ago, crazy^millman said:

Why are the stock models tolerance .001? Try .005 or even .01 as a tolerance. People who use stock models for verification are wasting time and effort for no good reason in my humble opinion. Why over burden the process for something that is meant to help speed up the process. I run 128GB on a i9 with RTX5000 card and I cannot get away with .001 tolerance on large files. Sorry you have a cracker Jack computer trying to do high end work. Tell management to quit being $1 million foolish and penny wise and get a real professional system.

Thanks for the response! Management recently said they were willing to spend some money on new computers but wanted to figure out a good "baseline" computer so all the programmers (~10 of us) can have the same setup. They started by using the benchmark file to test different GPU's..... 

They're current stance is "why get new computers if we aren't leveraging 100% of what we have?" So I need to figure out how to answer that question now.

You hit the nail on the head with "stock models for verification" that is what I do. What're alternative methods? Verify compare? Always looking to program faster. I usually stick around .001 because I read (probably on this forum) that stock model tolerance should be around 30% of stock being left on. I rough to +.005 stock so .001 seemed suitable.

Original question still stands, I'd like to see my CPU and Memory at 80-90% (or more) when crunching stock models, how do I get there?

Gonna hijack this thread. I'm getting back into a large project from a few months ago and I forgot how much it sucks to wait for 20 stock models to regen when each one takes 30-60 seconds. I enjoy whistling but my lips get tired after that long.

Here's where I'm at:

Dell Precision 3571 laptop

CPU – Intel i7-12800 2.4GHz

RAM – 32GB

GPU – NVIDIA T600

The part - picture a mashup of an aerospace part and a mold 3 x 9 x 24".

The files - 300-600MB with 150-300 operations (10-15% of operations are stock models). All stored locally. I am connected to a company network but the only thing          Mastercam pulls from the network is tool holder libraries when I select a new holder.

stock models - each uses the previous stock model as stock and on average gets 1-10 operations each. All tolerances set to .001.

Here's my main issue, nothing seems to be maxed out when regenerating these stock models. I have multithreading set to use 10 out of my 14 threads and priority set to high. Watching task manager, CPU almost never goes over 35% (sits around 25-30% and spikes to 35%) and Memory stays at 50%. In configuration > Toolpaths > Memory buffering I set "% of physical memory" from default 50 to 85 and saw no difference. It seems something is still limiting Mastercam to only using 50% of my memory.

My question is, what am I missing here? Obviously something else is limiting performance but what?

Side note, when Mastercam is open and idle, my memory is at 45-50%. Not sure if that's normal or something else is screwed up on my end. This is the case for any file, not just these larger ones.

Thanks in advance for any help. MC2023

17 hours ago, 215 said:

Im not sure?  If I have a large program and I want to cut and paste,  I currently have to scroll back to where I want to cut or paste.  I would like to set a mark,  then select to that mark and cut or paste.

I know you're talking code expert, but in CIMCO Edit there is a Mark/Delete Range function. Give it the first and last line# to mark and it highlights it for you.

19 hours ago, Jobnt said:

Axial engagement will vary depending on radial engagement. Try different combinations to find what works best.

You can run full depth with > 75% radial engagement but your feed will be very slow.

Or you can run full depth with < 10% radial engagement and extreme feed rates.

Or you can run at < 5% axial depth with full radial engagement and feed stupid-fast but I've never gotten the MRR to be more efficient using the last method. Machines usually can't accel fast enough to hit those kinds of feed rates before it has to slow down for the next corner.

Agree with all of this. Will add that some end mill geometries are made specifically for a single one of these approaches.

Example, you won't have much success slotting with a 9 flute endmill in steel, but a light step over and full axial engagement with the same endmill will outperform a standard 4 flute endmill. 

On 10/16/2023 at 7:09 PM, crazy^millman said:

Then I purpose we do a time study on some projects. We then offer them the option give me 10% of what I help them save for one year or pay for a week of my time. Every company that I have offered that to has never once given the 10% I have saved them. I have saved companies well over $100 million over the years of doing this. Still saving one customer $10 million a year that cheated me out of 400 hours back in 2017. Time reduction one one project was 5000 hours of assembly time per rocket and they are launching one about every week. Sad part is I wish I was making this stuff up. It drives me crazy to see waste and un-efficient methods and processes.

Biggest reason I am the crazy millman is how crazy this profession makes me.

I just got asked to speed one of our high quantity jobs. I was figuring ROI on a couple options and started a discussion with my boss about our shop rate. He said "If you cut 10 minutes off the runtime you save $x on this lot, 20 minutes $x * 2." My response, "can I get 5% of that in my paycheck?" He laughed and told me if that's how it worked he would've retired a long time ago.

1 hour ago, crazy^millman said:

I would use Pocket and then project to 5 axis surfaces. I would then drive the toolpath using Curve 5 Axis

11 minutes ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

You can do a lot with Convert to 5 Axis, even if you leave it locked to 3 axis!

I'm gonna have to look into convert to 5 axis. I've never played with it but it seems like a really useful tool to have in my tool belt. 

Crazy idea... could you program the part with optirough from the Z minus direction instead of from the Z plus direction. Then convert the Z minus toolpath to wire. Then run a 2D contour with no cutter comp from the Z plus direction by chaining the wire?

Sounds kind of bonkers and like a bit of extra work but I think it has the potential to work?

You would have to manually draw the initial entry and exit motions.

7 hours ago, SuperHoneyBadger said:

Is there a way to add sorting fields beyond the default Tool Manager columns? 

closest I could come up with was a right click > setup sheet

The default shows your RPM / Feed for each op. Definitely not a very friendly solution. 

2 hours ago, Newbeeee™ said:

/swerve

X+....1x click and it can tell you G54/55 etc, RPM, T=D, Coolant, etc....

What's the $ for X+?

I think I free demoed it once upon a time 

My custom RAH post is made from the MPRouter post. Made the modifications a few months ago.

The tutorial videos I watched said the MPFan or MPMaster posts don't have the logic for RAH out of the box.

I've not heard a good solution to this issue. Programming the tool as a sharp corner is a very interesting solution.

I suppose it'd be possible to modify the model to make a "plus stock" model and run opti rough off that. Depending on your part that could be a LOT of extra work.

If someone has a better way to eliminate these cuts I'd love to hear it.

Dumb idea. Is there a parameter that can flip the Z axis plus/minus direction on the machine? If there is, how dumb would it be to G10 and use a standard drill peck cycle?

3 hours ago, JParis said:

short qty <2000 usually

2000 is a low qty for you guys? Our largest qty's are around 2000. 

5 hours ago, SlaveCam said:

Do you disassemble and assemble tools between different jobs, or always have default tools that once assembled, are never taken apart?

If we expect the job to repeat the tooling stays assembled in a rack. Tooling for prototype / one off parts gets fully assembled and disassembled every time.

Most of our parts vary too much to do standard tooling. Earlier this year we were cutting a 10 x 12 x 20" chunk of aluminum. The following job was a piece of duplex stainless 3 x 12 x 30". The next one was a little copper part 1 x 4 x 6". 

Is the majority of your tooling cost in buying new tools? Or you just don't want so many assembled tools sitting around?

1 hour ago, jpatry said:

One of our engineers loves to model the threads in every threaded hole

Sounds like the type of guy to model .010 edge breaks across the whole part too 

7 hours ago, jpatry said:

Also, is there a way to install just the standalone tool manager on a computer?

Because I could get our toolroom attendant cataloging stuff, at least preliminarily, but he doesn't need a full CAD/CAM package installed.

In the quick start guide for the standalone tool manager it says if you have a fresh install of Mastercam you can't run the stand alone tool manager until after running Mastercam at least once. I believe this is because running Mastercam creates certain files that the stand alone tool manager requires to run.

If I could take a second to hijack this thread... Is there a way in the stand alone manager to sperate an assembly? Meaning split the tool from the holder to use the two separately or in another assembly? 

18 hours ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

My favorite is when the alloy of this order isn't exactly the same, so all of that painstaking work you did optimizing the cut times on the first lot of material when you first ran the job no longer applies, and your tool life is like 50% of what it was previously!

Just had something similar happen last week. Ordered some fixture material 4140 annealed on accident, we usually get 4140 heat treat. Sent a .609 dia cobalt drill in and broke it off. Had to scratch our heads for a little while before we caught the mistake. Adjusted the drills speed and feed and we were back to making our fixtures.

You need to uncheck "automatically determine Z depth"

You can put a wireframe point where you want the center of the tool to start and end. Then in the chain manager chain that wireframe point. In the toolpath parameters > Lead in / Out > check the "use entry point" and "use exit point" checkboxes. Note, the chained point usually needs to be before the contour chain in the chain manager for this to work. 

I usually set one of the models as my stock, make a dummy toolpath that cuts nothing, then use the second model as my part model. Jump into verify and use the compare function. 

This one's probably common knowledge. I just figured out in OptiRough you can use stock models as your stock if you select "Rest material" > "One other operation" > select a stock model in the operations list on the right. 

I'll be using this instead of exporting STL's from now on.

1 minute ago, gcode said:

and he was 6ft 8, insanely handsome, women fell at his feet, he singlehandedly saved a fortune 500 company from ruin because he was so freakin' awesome

and he loved punching Nazis in the face. 

Sounds like a great guy