Actually on contour cuts and cutouts o-flute tooling seems to work best IMO, they are specially made for plastic applications. A good source is from Onrud Cutter. I have used them a good bit in trimming out 5-axis thermoformed parts and they make better chips and leave a very nice finish.

In the ftp in the text & post files is a WCS-view manager tutorial.zip. It is for V9 but should give you some good info.

Have your admin rights accidentally been changed to read only somehow?

He really ought to look at using 3/8" schrupp roughers for the roughing cut. They have a serrated edge that seems to do better in plywood applications. Then do a finish pass with a 1/4 smooth edge cutter. We used these roughers for cutting 7/8" in one pass doing upholstery frames with a Shoda. Another thing is to use as small a cutting edge as possible and put as much up in the collet as you can to help with the tool deflection. Take a look in the link below at the 60-900 | Three Edge Solid Carbide EXHD Hogger. Onsrud Router Bits

One thing to try is to turn the resolution down while creating the surfaces. Once you have everything the way you want it, save. Then try bumping up the resolution before doing the toolpath. This helps in some cases with speed of creation and crashes. Also helps to be using a strong computer if your getting into complex Art projects. Especially if they are over 10 inches or so. I would recommend at least a duo core processor with 2 Gb of ram. If you can handle the price the dual XEON with 4 gb of ram seems to do very well with large Art projects in my experience so far. I have worked on some 96 inch x 48 inch projects and it was a struggle to get thru without crashing in creation and toolpathing. By using the resolution trick I got thru and got it to post.

May want open an explorer window, go to tools, folder options, view tab, uncheck the box beside Hide Extensions for Known File Types.

For a temporary work around you can download printkey 2000 from the internet. It is a screen capture utility that I have used with Mastercam for years. I have run into problems many times trying to print from the different versions of Mstercam and this is a great tool for capturig the sreen image. It allows you to place a window around what you want to capture and save as .bmb, .gif, or .jpeg.

Also when setting up the toolpath look at machining with parrallel at a given angle not just 0 or 90. sometimes a 45, 23, or 66 degree angle will leave a better finish depending on the direction of the surfaces to be cut.

I run my hasp on a hub and only put flash drive into slot on computer itself and I don't seem to have that issue anymore on my laptop. May or may not work for you but may be worth $10-15 for a hub to give it a try.

When I was managing the CNC Dept. at my last gig we had work cells set up. The cnc operator might run a router and while the machine was cycling the operator took the piece that just came off the machine and flat belt sanded it, side stroke sanded it, and/or jitterbugged it depending on the part. Some cells ran solid wood parts those operators used brush sanders and hand sanded. we got creative in laying out the cell so that the operator wasn't killed but did stay busy. Maybe there are some later operations that they could be doing. Glueing in dowels was a good one we used.

You have to create a base surface/rectangular first that lays on top of the geometry you want to use. The organic creation needs this to know where to create the surface on. As far as info, if you go to your c:/mcamx/documentation/ there should be a Art Tutorial.pdf file to get you started.

Also if you copied the geometry from one op to another and you told it to retain the depth values it will grey out the depth to keep the depth of the other op. If you tell it to no it will not grey out the depth.

It's an on board mobile intel 945gm, on a sony vaio laptop. We have also seen it happen on a toshiba laptop and couldn't get cross hairs to change from black in the graphics window.

Awesome news.

Never mind. Jimmy beat me to the punch.

You need to go to mastercam.comsupportdownloadsmisc and download drivers_x.zip, extract the files and run the drivers.bat to load the new hasp drivers. It will run 2 dos programs to load the drivers and you should then be able to find the hasp and run V8.1

I believe for now you will have to start a new toolpath to pick a different boundry. I have not found a way to do it any other way yet.

Does anyone have a list of m-codes and g-codes for a Shopsaver Mill? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry I'm late to respond Chris. It's great to see the progress you've made. Continued prayers for you and the family.

Praying for whole the family. Get well soon.

Has anyone ever set a Daewoo mill with Mitsubisi control to dnc? Can you give me an idea of the settings for Cimco and if anything was different about the cable. Anything in machine that has to be set? Thanks in advanced for any info.

Here is a screen shot of a drill block laying on it's side so you can see it. If you go to Mastercam.com look at the X2 Router section you should see this section on block drilling.

Block drill is a bank of preset sized drills usually in an L shape on 32mm center fron each other that are dropped down as needed for drilling specified holes. They are used for doing shelf pin holes in end panels for adjustable shelves that are 32mm apart usually. By using the block drill it looks at the holes and figures out which drills to drop to process the drilling of the shelf pin holes for the fastest cycle time. In a 11 hole line it will bore 5 at a time twice, then lift 4 of the 5 and only drill the last 1.

V9 can act wierd on new computers, if the profiles don't work try right clicking on the desktop, properties, settings, advanced, troubleshoot, set the graphics acceleration bar from full to 1 position right of none, apply, ok, appearance, effects, uncheck the (use the following transition effect for menus and tooltips. This will help with V9 issues a lot of times.

You may also want to let your boss know that a lot of new and helpful features have been added since V8 that he can't see just by looking at the main screen. He also should consider that the longer he waits to make this transition the further behind you guys are from your competition that has moved up to X2. These guy's will tell you they are faster and have more tools in their arsenal now that they are using X. Yes, there is a learning curve but you will be better off as a company to make the transition and use the tools you've already paid for. I didn't hear any mention of training in your previous note. Maybe the boss could send you to training or buy the certification kit that has the video tutorial with audio on drawing and toolpathing. Maybe let him know about these as well as the forum and have him look at the Mastercam.com website to look at what been added since V8. Hope the info from everyone here helps.