thank you all for the responses

I have tapped holes in A2 and S7 material that gets heat treated. Do you oversize taps in these two materials before heat treat. And they have dowel holes in the parts, Do you adjust the hole size for heat treat in these materials? The dowel holes are just press fit but my concern is will they become to tight after heat treat? Thanks in advance.

For aluminum I prefer 3 flute osg blizzards. 4 flute is not enough chip evacuation. Plus your rpm is low for aluminum. My machines only go to 7500 rpm but I always cut at that speed and the chips just fly out with no problems. I have great success with streaker end mills from Imco. They last so long in aluminum with good coolant flow.

Thank you Disciple for the set of formulas. This is always nice to have for reference.

Autodesk Suite and the latest Mastercam

I love the precision of the chic vise. But if you have any production its sucks how you have to insert the handle in the front and then tighten it and it hangs way out in the front so your not leaving it on the vise. great idea

Just clamp in hand tight. I am not reafing on it. I just got a reply back from Kurt and they said .003 to .005 is normal for up to 80lbs of force. I bought a new chick vise and I have to say I am amazed it had no deflection at all. I just hate how it tightens. So I am going to try and beef up the back with a plate like suggested and see if that helps.

Great idea on the back holes of the vise. Thanks alot I will try that before I drill into the harden vise.

I have a kurt vise that is fairly new and what I find is if you put an indicator on the back jaw and then clamp a part in it. It flexes .0015 to .0035 thousands depending how tight you clamp it. The model is the D688 kurt vise where there are only a key way and 2 bolts from the bottom. I was wondering if any one had the Kurt HD90 where they have 4 bolts from the top? It seems like this would help deflection. I am thinking about adding 2 bolts thru the back jaw and tapping into the vice its self to help hold the back jaw down from flexing. I was wondering what other people have done to fix this issue and does the new kurt vices stop this deflection? Thanks in advance

I have a vmc15 and have made good money with it. Not the best cnc in the world but makes me some good money.

I come from an Autodesk Inventor background and took catia classes and had no problem drawing it in. Now I only designed in it and never actually did detail drawings. So the detail part of it I dont know but the actual 3d drawing was no problem after the training courses.

Sure did. I also created an excel spread sheet. That all you have to do is fill in the length of each leg,the thickness, the radius, the angle being bent, and it will give you a straight length cut size. Thanks for the proper wording to google. I tried to find it first but did not know what to call it.

Thank you for your help

I use the Mastercam X5 in the english format. My question is when I have a metric tap I just create a rh tap then put the value of the metric in the treads per in box. My question is there a way to copy all the taps from the metric side to show up in the english side also? Thanks

thank you

I was wondering how to figure out how long to cut a piece of stock the has one leg 3" long, and the other leg 2" long. With a 1/4" radius and the material is 1/4" thick. So it looks like a l. Do you just add the 3" leg and the 2 leg and cut it 5"? Thanks in advance.

Thank you so much for the info and help.

Has anyone ever heard of a -6AN tap? I have a customer calling out a tapped hole that is -6an thread. This is a link to what is threading into it. http://www.jegs.com/i/Russell/799/640930/10002/-1. But I cannot find a tooling vendor that knows what this tap is. Hoping some one on here has some experience with this kind of tap and where they purchased it from. Thanks for your time.

Well after seeing this list of machines I can see everyone is in a different league than me lol. But I can at least say I own them free and clear which helps from a buisness standpoint. (1) Fadal VMC totally rebuilt from the ground up. (1) Haas bought brand new in 2009 (1) Seat of Mastercam had to throw this in the list as this is just as important as any machine I have in my shop.

Now if only the had a G-code to make the tool change faster lol.

Thank you so much Mclaren. The first program was 22 seconds. The second was 18 seconds. And the third was just wow it was 6.5 seconds. Thanks a ton thats what I was looking for in a roughing cycle where tolerance does not matter.

Do you replace all G0 with G8?

I do alot of surfacing and yes the fadal not the best machine for that but it works. I just was wondering if these settings would allow me to rough maching surface faster. As they dont have to be perfect just when I do the finish surfacing. But after playing with the arc filters I found that helped the most. I cant believe have it ran so much smoother and the file size is 80% smaller.

Thanks for all the suggestion. Mclaren that engraving looks very nice.

Thank you for the suggestion.