I used to machine a lot of ren-board at the last place I worked at... We tried using MB-3000 (from BCC I believe...) as an alternative and ended up sticking with it. Better surface finish and much less dust created when machining. I think it maight be a bit more expensive, but it was worth it IMO.

here's a link if you wanna check it out

www.bccproducts.com/TDS/modelingboards/techdataMB3000.pdf

+1000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000!

I see MAZDA3 CAPKANNON.MC9 as wel...

+1 to Rhino for stl mesh file manipulation techniques

..oops, double post

I would translate the red center geometry up in the z and then create ruled surfaces between the blue and red geometry to get your pyramid shape surfaces. This can get a little tricky depending on how the chains are broken up.... I dont have MC here at home, but if you can upload an igs file of this geometry to the ftp, I could do this for you in rhino pretty quickly if you want

[ 01-17-2008, 09:54 AM: Message edited by: Zero ]

without seeing the part...off the top of my head I can think of a couple of ways to accomplish this...

the easiest being to just use a surface rough pocket toolpath and selecting the seperate depths of the pockets in the cut depths/critical depths dialog.

depending on how the part looks, you could also create curves all edges/or use the silhouete boundry c-hook to create the pocket profiles you need pretty easily as well...

wow....Ron, I think thats the nicest I've ever seen you be to a newbie asking for a post..

its most likely some bad geometry in your chain....try redrawing your chain with arcs and lines and delete the old one, see if this helps..if you could upload your file to the ftp some of us could check it out for you

yup,been brought up before here and here.

Its supposed to have been fixed for MR2

Yeah, I hear ya on that one...I still machine strictly from surfaces and never from solids after getting burned a quite few times machining solids in V9

as for that specific coolant issue, I dont know...but I do know that edit common parameters works much better than it did (or didn't actually...) in V9.

You can get the same results as Matts 5-axis toolpath with a 3 axis surface finish project toolpaths using the same geometry.

I uploaded an example, check out RAK_62_EZRA.MCX

Thanks Mick

same here....

You can also control the floor by using check surfaces and playing with the "at surface edge roll tool" settings. I uploaded your file back named as DAN_FLOWLINE-SURFACE_CONTOUR.MC9 to the ftp so you can see what Im talking about. This is just a real quick contour I generated with a few of the settings I mentioned. Play around with this stuff untill you get the results you desire.

Any reason you wouldnt just use surface finish contour for a situation like this? That's what I would do

ditto

When you import the SW file as an igs, you get surfaces instead of a solid. Then when create curves all edges, the reason you get "duplicates" is because MC is creating curves on the edges of the vertical hole walls as well as the edge around the hole of the surface the hole punches through. The .0003-.001 dufference in arc size is because of the igs file tolerance. You might try getiing the customer to send parasolid or native SW files to see if you can get cleaner geometry when creating curves on all edges, as the others here are suggesting. Personally, to avoid this problem, I always just create curves>one edge on any surface edges I need geometry off of to avoid having any extra un-needed wireframe that I wont be using

The Op Manager is now moveable!!!!!!!! HOORAH!!!!!

The new boundry creation tool looks really slick too.

you could probably soft-mod that card to perform just like a quadro fx....

unfortunately, you're SOL...no way to rstore a zero byte file.

do you have autosave or backup files active in MC? This is pretty much the biggest reason to do so...

YES!!!!

oh yeah, and thanks too

my experience with project is that the new projected entities will be created with the current active level and color...is this not what you're seeing?

I believe this is how it has always worked...at least since version X....

thats actually a really cool idea...as long as your fixture doesn't melt away before you're done needing it..