Model should always be bible. Prints should be used a references for tolerances and hole call outs. I just ran into this today Bored hole with a .005" tolerance all drawn the same .100 bigger on all 4 parts that stack together to make the asembly. A simple call to the customer and we were told follow the print. Hope the guy making the pins catches it as well otherwise they are going to have a bit of trouble assembling this thing and it will be assembled and tested in front of their customer that they are making this machine for. Just hope my boss sent a email to reconfirm what was said on the phone.

I would be interested in that wake up program especially if I could add my warm up program to the end of it.

I just spoke to tech support and they have to be done seperately, but definitely would be nice. Thanks for the help though.

Good morning, Is there a way I can punch out the tool offsets with my program where I can load them all back in next time I do the job?

Just got off with Haas applications support and if you change parameter 33 (work co-ordinate) from Fanuc to Haas it will stop the values in G52 from erasing everytime a M30 is read. This is going to save a tonne of time and a lot of mistakes.

Ya but all my machines are different sizes which would cause to many issues with loading a part programmed for my VF2 onto my VF4. Was wondering if there is a way to do this at the control (possibly a parameter to keep it from resetting) or if it was possible to set it with G92. I am looking online for more info about G92 but it is telling me from what I have read that it can play havoc on machine home zeros.

Currently right now all our work offsets on our VMC are taken from distance above the vise ways to where machine Z0. is set for the part. To do this though we are taking the known distance from spindle to vise ways (Z- distance) and adding our fixture and part thickness to where we program our Z zero. ( 3 calculations and end up with a Z- value for our offset Z value) What I would like is to use world shift (G53 offset EXT 00 on fanuc) to put the known height machine home to the vise way we use as our reference. So now all of our Z co ordinate offsets would be a positive value and will pick up the shift. When I use G52 right now it does what I want but everytime the machine reads a M30 it resets the preset values in that offset.

I just ended up creating new planes and used the edit common parameters it was faster than trying to play with the transform (with which I am novice with at best). Thank you for all the help and ideas though guys. I spoke with my vendor and he tells me that in X8 you can rotate a plane without having to create a new one so guess I should finally upgrade before the next one of these legacy programs comes up.

I keep getting errors that boundary doesn't lie in the construction plane no matter which view I use. I probably also should have mentioned is the reason I have to rotate the part is because my rotary table configuration between the two machines are different. Taking the job off a chuck style that 360 degrees on A and 90 on B to a trunnion style.

I have a part that has multiple planes that has already been programmed. What I would like to do is rotate the WCS 90 degrees around z and lock all my planes to the wcs and have them rotate with the wcs. Is this possible? and if so what is the easiest way to lock everything together so I don't need to recreate all my planes and update all the tool planes on all my operations?

WIth file management do you guys do sort them by machine or specialized file names. One of the concerns my bosses have is that if we post for a haas the first time but next time the job is run that we than post it to our mori and back and forth. I know it is easily enough to keep apart by setting up your directories as to where things post and what folder. I am wondering what people have found the easiest. Right now there is no rhyme or reason to how programs got numbered and with as many legacy programs as I have here (keep in mind the file name is different for each part but not for each machine. In the past I have always used seperate folders based on machine and than all programs were sequential with part number following the O# and we never had a problem per say other than human error.

Just wondering what software and hardware configurations people are running for sending programs back and forth from the machines to the computer. They currently use a switch here with Cimco Edit but a lot of time is spent walking back and forth to send/ recieve. I looked at the CIMCO DNC Max teaming it with a ethernet hub and like the ability to call the program directly from the machine to recieve and no prep is needed at the computer to punch but it is fairly pricy when you buy all the required extra ports for it. (we have 16 machines here). The other plus to using Cimco is people are use to the UI. I should add that 99% of the programs here are small enough that machine memory isn't a problem and programs will be uploaded to the control and then ran through memory as opposed to drip feeding.

Yes that is checked already.

Just upgraded my box to win7 pro x64 and now whenever I repost a file that I already have open in the editor I don;t get the prompt "file has been modified outside the editor do you want to reload it now" anymore and keeps the original file and doesn't reload the new one. What do I need to do so that I can get it working like it use to?

We had a tech out and they say it is square and level. I haven't seen the issue yet since this is the first run I have done on this and I didn't use tool staging. I am going by what the owner has told me. It is a 60 tool carousel mounted just to the casting and no support underneath. It is just held on by a few bolts. I know it is mounted at the bottom but haven't spent enough energy checking if it there is also a bracket at the top because the table moves in Z as opposed to the spindle colume you would think their would be top brackets.

Yes that is the machine actually. Good little machine so far. The only downside I have found is with the tool changer and staging the next tool. It shakes the machine and causes my surface finish to diminish. The tool changer is mounted to the machine with no floor support so i may look at gabbing extra legs to try and dampen the vibrations. Other than that it is a nice little HMC.

I ment the WCS in the operation not mcam in general. These parts were originally programmed for a 3 axis vmc and I am switching them to a HMC. To do this Top is actually what normally wou;d be front (B0.) then I am rotating left and right (b90 and B270.) so my Y+ points to what would be back in a normal HMC configuration. I know it sounds dumb but as opposed to rotating all the top to be front and then also redoing left and right I am just redoing left and right.

Sticky you are the man when I go into Misc values as long as everything is set to "automatically set to post values when posting" my problem goes away. I have never understood the misc values or have any idea what they are used for so I never even thought to look there. For some reason some were set others were not and it is the same type of operation that was causing the conflict (contour). And no I am not using transform as of yet (atleast). I am setting seperate co ordinate systems on the machine for each piece. The machine is a twin pallet Hitachi Seiki with Secos (fanuc based) control. They picked it up a couple months ago and it has been sitting idle up until I started. Still designing my tombstones and fixtures for all the repeat parts we want on this machine. To keep up with orders I have just been taking existing programs they have ran on the verticals here and flipping my planes and using multiple co ordinate systems to set my xyz's Probably not the best way but until we get the tombstones and fixtures drawn up and made it works for now. One nice thing about this new place is they have a few 5 axis mills along with a few mill/turn machines that I will get to play with and try to program which should be fun to learn something new

First I must say so glad to be at a company that has mastercam again, but running into a issue, maybe this is known but it is new to me. We have some existing programs for a repeat job we do regularly that we use to run on one of our verticals which has a post from in house. Part of me coming on here is because they bought a HMC with pallets they want mne to move a lot of our vertical work onto so we can set up thombstones and run lights out. Currently we are using the Fanuc generic 4 axis hmc to post (while So I am taking the existing proven mcam file copying and pasting all the ops within my operations manager by tool and then changing my WCS in my planes page to reflect which of the multiple parts I am doing. The problem I am having is some tools are not posting the G54 ,G55 etc..... but some do. In my plane page in my op they are all set to use WCS and set to 0 and 1 (G54 and G55) but for some reason only half the tools post the G54 and G55 and the ones that don't rerun the same tool path twice on the same part as opposed to once on each. Does anyone know if this is a issue with the generic post or a known bug in X5? While I await a call back from In House figured I would pick a few of your brains. I am yet to try and put it into X6 and try to post mainly because we also have off site programming done here and that is done in X5 so I am just matching what the other guy is doing so files can be swapped back and forth.

I was always told by the boss we couldn't (this was also in Ontario about 15 years ago. We always sent it to Detroit.

I agree with one WCS but still like to use different work offsets for all my planes (rotations) so the numbers in my program match my print. (Granted you need all dimensions to come off a similiar datum point). For setting my COR I find out where the center of the table is comparative to machine zero multiply that by 2 than subtract where my datum lies on the machine. This gives me the shift needed to set all other co-ordinates no matter what the plane is. I hear you can change your machine zero to your COR but never attempted it, was always to worried how that would effect tool change position so I just do the math.

Use to cut a lot of it for mould inserts. Whenever a mistake was made and we had to weld it up we had to send it to the states because it is illegal to weld in ontario canada

+1 to Jing. Great freeware and so easy to use.

Those values should not have a decimal place. Ie on inch machines 20 = .002" and 500 = .05".

Isn't the Q always a decimal place? I thought with Fanuc only the P held that distinction? I would check the parameter for peck clearance retract off the top of my head I forget if whether these are controlled by parameter 3114 and 3115 or whether it is 5114 and 5115. One refers to the distance about the R plane it Rapids above the other the distance above it stops before the last feed. Check to see if the corolating one isn't set to zero. Which would cause it not to retract if i am not mistaken.