I will give give that a try Chris. Thanks

The material has already been heat treated. I will suggest carbide. Has anyone used powdered metal drills. Thanks again Toolman for all your replies.

Thanks for the replies. With what kind of drill Toolman. Also do you have any reccomendations that are not to expsensive. Maybe a certain brand, material, tip angle, coating, etc. Unfortunately one of the areas my company likes to cut costs in is tooling and it can be hard to convince them to buy higher quality tools. Thanks again.

I am drilling about 20 holes in heat treated 4340 and I am having problems with the drill breaking on every other part. Drill size #40 (.098) speed 600 RPM Feed .4 ipm peck .025 depth z-.400 I am pre drilling with a #2 center drill and the # 40 drill is held in a keyless chuck. I have tried both HSS black Ox and Cobalt drills and have not had much luck with either. The drill is getting plenty of coolant, and the drills are spinning true within .001. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Merry Christmas, Justin

Bob, Try this www.haascnc.com Go to "customer service" then "technical forum" then "ask the question man". Someone from Haas will usually reply with an answer to your question in about 24 hours. They also have phone support. Hope this helps. Have a good one.

Thanks John, That page shows the G60 command I think that is the one I'm looking for.

I know Fadal has a code when drilling to make the machine approach all the holes from the same direction which helps eliminate the backlash and holds the hole location tighter. I was wonering if a Haas can do the same thing.

The hole size is .132 diameter. The holes are thru holes and go about 1.160 deep in 17-4 before it is heat treated.

I am trying to drill some holes on a Haas VF4 that are spaced 1.500 + or - .001. I think there might be a code maybe a G60 "uni-directional positioning" that will help hold the location. If anyone has any experience with this can you please inform me as to how it works, and where I would place the code in the program. Thanks in advance. Justin

Now that I think about it that second rule seems like it would only apply if you were programming from the center of the tool (which I don't recommend)with a value in your geometry column not your wear column.

Cutter compensation on some machines works off the diameter on others it works off the radius and on others there is a parameter to set cutter comp to work off radius or diameter. For instance on the Haas where I work I take the amount my tool is undersize divided by two and enter that number into the wear column because it is set to work off the radius. A good way to tell how any machines cutter compensation works is to compare the programmed X,Y, coordinates with the actual position of the cutter while it is cutting. This will tell you if a wear amount of -.01 actually compensates the tool by .01 or .005. Two simple rules are #1 always turn cutter radius compensation on or off together with a tool motion .ie.....G41 D1 X-1.0 or G40 X1.0 and #2 the radius of the cutter should be smaller than the programmed length of the tool travel. For eaxmple G41 D1 X-1.0 is only good for a tool with a radius smaller than 1.0. If the radius is larger you will get the infamous "CRC Interference" alarm. If these two rules sound textbook it's because they came right out of one. Have a great day everyone.

Sometimes the STLHeal c-hook fixes that error but as you probably know it is hit or miss. Thanks for the info Collin when I get some extra time I will look into that.

If you don't need the wireframe used to create the solid you can run the nohist c-hook then delete the wireframe. Then the solid won't be linked to any other geometry. As far as window not working I don't know. Hope this helps.

The FTP site has a great example of how to do this for two vises using two fixture offsets in the WCS tutorial. The tutorial is written for V9 but it is probably similar for X.

Welcome to the forum. Hello to everyone. Like these guys said you can xform translate anytime using any type of entity. There are many different reasons for using xform translate, for example positioning you part correctly with repect to your origin, copying geometry etc... if you are a little more specific in what you are trying to do I am sure we can be more helpful.

I normally set WCS to top and create a new tool plane for each face of the part. If you have a solid model you can select your tool plane by selecting tplane/entity/solid face then select the face you are going to machine. I am just learning about 4-axis programming but I hope this helps.

You can also copy the operation for example ten times then go back and copy all ten operations and every time you paste you will be pasting ten copies of your operation. I haven't actually tried this in Mastercam but I think it will work.

Hey Blazing.....150 seats of mastercam? They should make it 149 and give you the can. Your lack of respect for the people in this forum only makes you look bad. Obviously the people in here don't need your help so the only one that your attitude will affect in the end is you. Hey guys someone needs to install parental controls on their computer because an eleven year old is online posing as an adult.

The WCS tutorial from the FTP site helped explain things to me MillingMan. That was for V9 but I think all the information is relevant to Mastercam X. I use WCS set to top and change my tplane for each side of the part. That is just my preferance because it is the only way I know how to do it. I am sure the other methods described to you work equally as well. Check out the WCS Tutorial it is available for download. I am new to WCS and tplanes but that tutorial gave me a good understanding of what to do and when.

I have been using the Mastercam X mill tutorial from In House Solutions. It has made the switch from V9 to X a lot easier. There are also many other books and CD-Roms that can help. I also went to school and used books to learn V9. To me it has definately been worth the investment. As you probably know this forum is also a very powerful tool for learning.

I never new about level sets until I read this. Then I went into Mastercam help and learned a little more. Definately a very cool feature.

I have just been using plain black but I guess I will try gradient. Anything but the defauult blue.

Thanks Lou I'll do that.

Lou that is what I am talking about. I have to delete the operation and then restart mastercam if I want to revert back. When I select my drill points I normally just select the center of the arcs I want to drill and they are drilled in the exact order I select. Sometimes I use point sorting and select the arcs using window. If I am not happy with the results I get and want to turn off sorting the only way I can turn it off is to delete the operation then restart mastercam. I was looking for another way to turn it off. I am using V9.1. Thanks for the replies.

I was messing around with the point sorting function for a center drill toolpath but then decided that I want to select my points manually. Now when I select my points manually to be center drilled in a certain order mastercam keeps reverting back to the point sorting order. Can someone please tell me how to turn off point sorting once it has been turned on. Thank you and I hope you are all having a great day.