Parabolic, I hope? I'd say about 165 SFM, and a .0013 chip, with a 1/3 diameter peck. You can be more aggressive if you pre drill to a 8x depth or so... That's what we used to use on aluminum valve bodies.

Chip is a great guy. He's given a lot to the coding community. Kinda like some people here. Wouldn't be right to not give him credit.

I'm still dealing with Y2K

Actually, had we got into how to do it, and you needed help, you would prolly end up with most of the code. But I don't "just give out" anything. If you search the threads, you'll see a lot of my macros that I've already put up for X+. As I said, im glad to help. But as you've seen in OT, im not much into just giving without effort on the receiver's side

I will be happy to help anybody. But cmon.... A lot of this stuff is what gives us a competitive edge. If you are looking for good scripts, Chip Pearson has a bunch he gives away. I actually use two of his. One is the delete duplicates. It is a must for X+, as it dumps every selected op, and often many ops use the same tool. Therefore, there will be duplicate tool info in the tool list you need to remove. It is actually out dated, and RemoveDuplicates method works much faster and MUCH less code. But I've kept the old method in place to keep compatibility with Excel 2003 just in case. There are all kinds of ways to skin the cat.

Ya, Ben it's pretty mandatory for doing what our sheet does. But it is as post and play as our programs. Click, Click, Print. With the exceptions of pictures and such. That still needs to be screen shot (again, with Gunther's screen cap) and annotated. I still haven't automated that yet. Thanks for the kind words, guys. Always happy to help any way I can. Just let me know.

Not a thing, probably. I just know X+, Excel, and VBA, insde out, and don't want to take the time to learn active reports. I'm sure it works well for many. This isn't the only way, just the way we do it. Twak!

Here is a screen grab of the sequence sheet. We call em Tool Maps. Gunther is really the nice guy, for making this cool tool (X+) available to us. I've just made some macros to control the look and feel for how we do things. This takes 3 clicks, and filling in the template info into the X+ dialog. I would be happy to help if needed. The coloring is just conditional formatting based on the G54 P value in a given cell. Pretty simple code..... Range("E5").Select 'select all G54 offset info to color format ActiveSheet.Range("E5", ActiveSheet.Range("E65536").End(xlUp)).Select Selection.FormatConditions.Add Type:=xlTextString, String:="P2", _ TextOperator:=xlContains Selection.FormatConditions(Selection.FormatConditions.Count).SetFirstPriority With Selection.FormatConditions(1).Interior .PatternColorIndex = xlAutomatic .Color = 65280 'GREEN .TintAndShade = 0 End With Selection.FormatConditions(1).StopIfTrue = False

All of my ops are commented. As are my planes named and commented, and tools commented with kanban info. Not only for the program, but for the X+ setup sheets. With a couple of clicks, we get a multi tab excel workbook. One tab is the sequence sheet. On this sheet is every Mastercam op, with the tool #, D offset, work offset, station and rotation, and operation comment. All color coded with specific colors set for each offset. The setup guys love them. "The issue is on the orange station". As Newbeee said, our job is to make the guy on the machines job as easy as possible. All our programmers hear that daily, as I manage our department with that in mind. We are merely servants to the machine guys. The spindle makes the $$$. Not the programmer.

That's my point, Daniel. Won't everybody have the same issues? Unless Zoller themselves provide import rules or roadmaps, all of the crib players are at an equal disadvantage. Until somebody -Parlec, et al come up with an easier way to conjoin. Then you will see Zoller as an outcast.

Wouldn't every system have the same issue with info sharing? XML is actually a pretty friendly import language. When I worked with cribmaster, you could set up rule files for import/export. Crystal reports supports XML easily, and can map different data sources pretty easily. Now, that being said, I do see that Cribmaster has been bought by Stanley, and I have no idea how good the software or support is now. But when Winware owned them, I was able to talk to developers directly. The support was off the hook good. And covered under standard maintenance. 2 day services packs were not out of the ordinary.

Not sure. But being SQL based, I'm sure you could make it so, depending on Zoller's output. If it can talk to Mastercam....

I did all that with cribmaster. I had live tool libraries that I could bring into mastercam. Used RFID. Every machine was a crib, and had vending machines, a master tool crib, tool boss, etc. over 10,000 tools. All available to import directly into MCX. Do a search here. I went into it in detail. It was a few years ago.

Swiss is a different animal. We've got 13 of em. We don't use Mastercam. Not so much Swiss specific tool paths as much as a Swiss mindset. The single pass turning is a function of rigidity. You don't want to draw back and forth thru the guide bush with cut stock, as there is no longer guide bushing support. As Ron said, use ground stock. The clearance between guide bush and material should be .0001-.0002. Max .0005 for best rigidity and accuracy. Another thing to watch for is when turning, if you draw a smaller dia into the guide bush too far, you may fall out of the bushing and smash up the material when it tries to push the material forward again. You could prolly kludge thru with Mastercam, but I wouldn't rev omens it.

We mill all day, every day on our swiss and mill turns. The mill turn has a mill head, so it's not apples to apples. But the Swiss is. We do go thru spindle bearings and gear drives for live tools once a year or two, depending on the usage. Mkd is spot on in that regard. We are also limited to 10k and 8k RPM on the live tools, so sometimes that is a bit of a limitation, as we do small medical. We have a number of jobs that are all mill from bar stock. The only turning is partoff to transfer to the sub spindle.

We looked into the Blueswarf tap testing a couple years ago. I could never justify the down time on the machine to tap test every tool. We are getting a 3PM system installed on a swiss machine tomorrow. It has a 30 day "love it or leave it" policy. So if we still have it in 30 days, it works. One of the large dental implant companies has them on all their swiss machines. Ive seen it in action, and it works great for tool life and breakage detection on tiny tools and parts. Their web page sucks, but here is a vid of the machine Boss system we are getting. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnWHfG0i8F0

Just put a space in the description ike this: To get this:

Gimme a few hours before I get in to work. I'll get it if someone else hasn't chimed in

Go to the bottom of the post, where you will see the drill cycle parameters layers out. (Search for a string like "custom cycle 9" to get there easily. Where you see the string, replace it with "" Or blank it out between the [ ] I'm at home and don't have a post in front of me. One of those, I don't remember by memory.

I ran into the same thing. As Daniel says, there are a lot of forums out there that encounter the same issue. I'm thinking it is in the heart of the forum backbone software (IP Board).

I filed a bug report.

That's why I never saw it. When I tried to login, it took me to the maintenance.mastercam.com and server not found. Maybe I should have logged in last week to know it was gonna be down.

I don't see a word about it. Certainly no green on white background. Today was the first time in a while I've tried to go there.

Not just you. When I try to log in, it tries to take me to maintenance.mastercam.com, and I get a server not found.

I believe so. Happens often. We just account for it