You can also "freeze" these parts in Dry Ice and them machine them while they are hard. You have to watch for part expansion when they heat back up to room temperature though. Sometimes the rate of thermal expansion can be calculated and you can cut your parts slightly undersize to make them nominal when they warm back up. HTH,

Matt, If you want one package for everything, spend $60,000.00 for one seat of Catia V5 with the NC package. Then you can spend $15,000.00 a year on maintainence. Every year. Nuff said.

Hi Rick, Same story here. You will have to go through your customer and have them provide you with that information. There is a huge issue with releasing Boeing information.

Thanks Shawn!

Inside Mastercam go to: Main menu bar - Settings - Configuration. In the Configuration Dialog box click on the screen topic.

Uh yeah... what Gcode said....

The FX 3450 is a great card. We run them here at work. Right click on your desktop, Go to Nvidia display, Performance and quality settings, and change the active profile to "Solidworks". Then go into Mastercam, Settings, Configuration, Screen Topic, and Check the Box for "disable front buffer". You should notice a huge performance increase. Also, Turn OFF autosave if you have it on. Only use Backup. HTH,

Uh oh. Looks like I've opened a can of worms here. I can't keep emailing this to everybody here. This file is only for X2. Shawn, Could you put that .dll file on the FTP for me? I can't upload files to the FTP here at work, I can only download them. Remember guys, when you are having a problem like this, you need to contact [email protected]. That is how I got this modified file in the first place. If enough requests are made then hopefully CNC Software would make this file available for download from www.mastercam.com. Thanks,

you've got mail Shawn.

One thing that could be causing your shut down problem when trying to open a file: If you save to a folder where you do not have "full control", when you attempt to do a "file open" Mastercam might be trying to load in file paths that you don't have permissions to "write" too. That might kill it. Have you tried contacting Chris Bell at CNC Software? He might be able to shed some light on what is going on. Is this file server Linux by any chance? This is not a "Mastercam" problem. Sounds like Mastercam, Windows, and your server/network hardware aren't playing nice together. Might be time to re-think the whole network.

Thats a good suggestion on the NCI path. We save our NC files and our MCX files to the network, but the NCI we save locally to our C: drive. Because the NCI gets copied to the MCX file internally when you save it, I have never worried that the NCI gets written to our local drive. I have no idea what we use for network management. Doesn't Windows Server do that? I have no idea who sold you on the idea of Novell, but it wasn't a CAD/CAM person. You might want to print this thread out and show it to your IT folks. Some people take security "over the top" and end up killing any chance of productivity. I would make sure that you have FULL CONTROL access to the main folder and all sub folders that you are using on the server. Then set up some kind of automatic archival setup to backup your data daily. That is what we do. We also have a NetHook program to manage our model check in/out. For more info on creating that type of NetHook I would contact Mick George. HTH,

Goldhntr, Did the new dll have any effect?

Still scratching my head here bruce. We do everything you want to do with no problems. Like you we are running the NetHasp on a small local server (located in our area), and saving data to a remote file server (located in another city). I like your idea about string length, that might be one place to start looking. I don't think any of our file path/name strings are more than 60 characters long. We do not impose any kind of limit, but our file storage structure is pretty basic. We have our storage server drive letter, let's call it "X" for now (I can't put up anything that is even remotely like our actual names, this is just an example). so our path would look like this: X:InWorkSomeRandomJobFolderNameMastercamPartFileName.MCX We are running Windows Server 2003 on our NetHasp server, I'm not sure if that matters or not, I really just dabble in the IT side of things. So to recap: Turn off "save bitmap" and use the "window" dialog for file get. - from Gcode Try creating a shorter path if possible for your server to use. Good luck,

Goldhntr, We have also experienced lots of problems with the IGES Translator in X2. After speaking with Pete Rimkus at CNC, we were able to get a new Import/Export dll for the Iges translator. This fixed all our IGES problems. I can't put the new DLL file on the FTP site because of our network restrictions. Email me and I'll send you the new .dll file. [email protected] HTH,

We run our files straight off the server, autosave turned off, Backup turned on, Config files are on the local machine, MD/CD/Posts/Tools are all on the network. We have the occasional Mastercam shutdown, but nothing that prevents us from running all of our files remotely. We have 26 seats of Mastercam on a NetHasp. I would look into your graphics card settings, make sure "backup" is enabled, save often, and run RAM Saver every 15 minutes. I personally run RAM Saver like its going out of style. I save after every toolpath operation I create(this has the benefit of creating an incremented backup copy of my current file. The backup directory gets bloated, but I do a sort by date modified about every 2 weeks and delete anything that is older than 4 weeks). The last thing that I would also check with your IT guys: Make sure that there is no "power setting" that allows windows to shut off the power to your network adapter. I'm not sure exactly where to find the settings, try "Power settings" in the Control Panel and also try the "Device Manager". HTH,

Hi Dave, A little insight into what is going on here. The post is checking some boolean conditions to determine if you want to output the lock/unlock codes or not. I'm going to break it down line by line. code: if use_clamp & not(opcode$ = three | cuttype <> zero), <---- This line "says", If [the "use_clamp" variable switch is set to on] and [opcode$ does not equal 3 OR cuttype (Is NOT) zero], THEN (thats what the comma implies) STATEMENT [ p_lock = zero s_lock = zero pbld, n$, s_slock, e$ pbld, n$, s_plock, e$ ] The statement in this case is an implied post block which basically just means "[Do this now]". It will execute the commands inside the braces in order without jumping. I would change the code to this: code: if use_clamp & not(cuttype <> zero), <---- This line "says", If [the "use_clamp" variable switch is set to on] and [cuttype (Is NOT) zero], THEN (thats what the comma implies) STATEMENT [ p_lock = zero s_lock = zero pbld, n$, s_slock, e$ pbld, n$, s_plock, e$ ] This will make sure that the rotary axes are not locked during a rapid move (cuttype = zero). FYI The double less than/greater than symbols together means "Is NOT EQUAL too" ( <> ). Hope that helps. By the way, I figured out all this post stuff on my own by reading the Version 9 Post Reference Guide. It is one of the most useful books I have ever read for Mastercam.

Try Surface Finish Pencil with Unlimited stepover. Its also available as a high speed toolpath (which rocks!) HTH,

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

Try running RAM saver on your file...

Benefits of having them right in your own backyard. Their facility is right down the street from Cimtech, the Wa. state reseller.

James, Why don't you email them and ask if they will share a CAD model with you. FYI, They create and program all their parts in Mastercam.

We are looking for a print driver that will output a Gerber vector file (not post script) from wireframe geometry. Is there one available for X2?

What does the dynamic scale show in the lower right corner of the screen? if it shows >1000000, then you probably have an entitiy that was created way out in 3D space. If you have a point that is at X600000.0 Y0 Z0 and the rest of your geometry is at the origin, then it will look like there is no geometry when you do a fit screen. Try this: First, Run Ram Saver. On a new level create a point at 0,0 and 1,1. Turn off the visibility of all other levels. Do a fit screen. You should see your points show up. Now turn on the rest of the levels and unzoom by .8 until your geometry is visible. Now set your selection mode to window and set the selection option to "outside". Window your geometry and it should select everything outside of your part geometry. If there is something outside your window the "unselect all" button will be highlighted (looks like an anti sign). Now hit delete and it will delete your piece of geometry that is floating out in space somewhere. Hopefully this is your problem, and not something worse. HTH,

Call Predator directly. They have great tech support. Predator - 503-292-7151 [email protected]

Gcode, He is running the Nvidia Quadro FX 3450, a high end CAD/CAM card that is Open GL to begin with.