Yes, Todd, I agree. We would love to hear about V7 working on a new computer as there is a C-hook called moldbase that we are fond of and it is a real problem keeping a WIN 98SE computer up and running. If any one has a fix let me know!

I meant to say "Robofil 310" in my earlier. Can a message be edited here after it is posted?

I have run a Charmilles Roboform 310 for years and on parts up to perhaps .5" thick .0001" is doable with a four pass program. On parts thicker than that the tolerance opens up a bit. I read up on this a bit and apparently when the wire is stretched a long distance between the upper and lower guides electromagnetic forces will bow the wire a bit and cause a "belly" in the part. The higher the current, the lower the tension and the greater the effect. That's why multi-pass cutting is required for more accuracy because each successive pass reduces the current and increases the tension. Of course more passes = more time = more cost.

You might want to save and U/L this as an earlier version. I'm still on X5 and I'm sure many decent programmers are even on earlier versions.

My first Mastercam experience was with I believe V3.5 running on an IBM XT with a 20 meg hdd and a 5.25" floppy. Thanks again for all the suggestions and comments. I will look at "change recognition". While we do do similar jobs, mold making is not exactly a production environment so we don't knock out hundreds of the same details so we'll see how it goes.

Thanks everyone. I played a bit with Feature Based Machining today. It looks like it will take some setting up and editing of our tool library and a good deal of attention to the operations manager after running the drill and mill FBMs. All of our frames are drawn in solids so this feature may work for us eventually. Now I have foreseen another related problem. A good deal of our frame work is repeat business or variations on previous work. If (when) we loss the ability to run the moldbase c-hook we will lose all of these operations and will have to rely on earlier posted intermediate files or reload the geometry and re-do all the work. Without an updated and backwards compatible version of the c-hook this looks unavoidable.

We are currently using an old WIN98 SE PC and running Mastercam V7 so that we can continue to use an old c-hook called moldbase that could project machining operations down through several plates based on the type of feature it is accomodating ie. a leader pin hole in the first plate might be a 1.001" PF with a c'bore, in the second plate the same feature might be a larger through bore and c'bore for a bushing etc. It gets harder and harder to keep these old PCs working and even harder still to keep them in communication with the newer server software. What function is incorporated in the latest versions of Mastercam that approximates this functionality? Thanks!