Rick, Remember that after you draw your spline through the 3D points you can project it back on to the surface you just used to create it. That might make it follow the original surface with better accuracy if you need it. I'm glad it worked...

Please send this [email protected] as a bug. In the meantime, use this work around: Using Surface Finish Contour to Make a 2D boundary HTH

I just tested it and it works in 3D mode for finding the intersections. You should be able to use flowline, pick your surface, set the option to distance, enter your distance (20), hit the apply button, re-select the same surface, hit the flip button, press ok, and now you have the opposing curves. Should take only a few seconds as long as you are working from a single surface...

Hi Rick, I think the "flowline curves" will give you exactly what you are looking for. To be able to snap to the intersection, you might have to be in 2D drawing mode to get Mastercam to recognize the intersections. HTH,

When you do the projection through Xform - Project, you need to select the surface button in the dialog box, pick the surface, then press the "normal" button on the Project dialog box. You should see the shape of the circle change to what looks more like an elipse in the graphics window. You should be able to switch between "view" and "normal" in the Xform dialog box, not in the Trim - surface to curve ribbon bar. As you switch between view and normal, Mastercam will update the shape of the projected curve while the dialog box is still open. This is a seperate step from the trim command. Do the "normal projection" first with Xform, then trim the surface to the curve. HTH,

Rakesh, If you still can not trim to the projected curve, try running RAM saver after you finish the Normal Projection using Xform. There is definitly something fishy going on...

Rakesh, It looks like a bug in X2. If you do the exercise and use the "view" button instead of the "normal" button, it works. As a work around you can do this: Use Xform - Project to project the circle onto the surface. Select the "normal" option in the Project dialog box. Mastercam creates the projected curve on the surface. Now do Surface - Trim to Curves, select the curve on the surface. Slide your arrow outside of the curve and press enter. Then it will work. HTH,

*Cough* The thing that will help you the most is to upgrade to X....

I've got an idea.... Why doesn't CNC Software use the year as part of the program name like Solidworks. I could see Mastercam 2007, Mastercam 2008, ect. That would eliminate some confusion. Although, personally, I don't find their current naming conventions that hard to grasp.

FYI, The "X" in Mastercam X has nothing to do with windows XP. It stands for roman numeral "10".

The "Grid lines" on a surface are not actual entities. They are the "surface density" lines that are for display purposes only. The whole reason behind them is so that you can visualize the surface in wireframe display mode. To snap to the intersections, you would have to create the actual curves as splines (use the flowline curve method). The other option is to simpily create a point using the dynamic point option on the surface. Note that when you are looking at the surface density lines, they are not spaced at a "known" distance along the surface. That is why you can not snap to them. HTH,

Create - Curve - Flowline Curve Set the curve quantity option to number or distance. Then use the Flip button to choose your direction. This will allow you to generate curves using the UV vectors of the surface. HTH,

The new Core 2 Duo (not the same as Xeon) are supposed to be much faster. You would have to get a compatible Motherboard though. JM2C,

Go with the FX 3450 card. Much better CAD/CAM graphics than the FX 1500.

Hi Nils, Boeing is very busy and quite exciting at the moment. I would send in your problem to QC as a bug. That being said, you might try and create two seperate splines first (partial chaining) and then use the two new splines to create one single spline. I would also try going into the CAD settings in System Configuration and changing the spline creation type to Parametric. NURBS splines do not seem to be as robust and compact in the Mastercam database as they used to be. I've noticed that in X (and X2) NURBS splines actually have more control points than the equivalant Parametic Spline. I find this very odd as a NURBS spline usually requires far fewer control points to represent the same shape as Parametric because of the underlying math that is involved (thank you Pierre Bezier and all of the others that made this possible!)

X2= "Version 11" X3= "Version 12" X4= "Version 13" Say what you want about how they have changed the naming conventions, each major release is a new version number. All the rest is just semantics. That is why you get the major version # at the top of the post. When X3 hits the shop floor you will see a "version 12.x.xx.x or something like that at the top of your pst file. If you go into Help - About you will see the version labeled like this: Mastercam X2(11.0.3.25) The numbers indicate the version number and build you are running. When X3 comes out it will be (12.x.x.xx).

Hi Guys, If you want to try something really fun with the AI utilities, hold down Ctrl+Shift and do the center scroll button and right click at the same time. You get kind of a hybrid zoom/rotate.

Watch out for the Autosave function as well. I've turned mine off for X2 and just use the Backup function.

Hi Nils, Have you checked the default under Configuration - Start/Exit for your construction plane? Try setting that to 3D. I can create a 3D spline from a set of curves just like normal. Are you running the "Entity Attributes manager"? HTH,

You can also run the "RAM Saver" utility in Verison X to help clean up any memory that is reserved, but not used. V9 tended to be a bit of a memory hog. The other questions I would pose to your boss: 1. Is this part file coming from SolidWorks? If so, run the "NoHist.dll" chook to remove the solids history tree. 2. How many Surfaces/Solid entities are there in the file? 3. How big is the part? (dimensions) 4. What kind of tolerance values are being set in the Mastercam configuration file? The computer you built should handle Mastercam beautifully. Good pick on the FX 3450 card. Also, Since you are running an Nvidia card, you might see better performance if you disable the "Front Buffer" in Configuration - Screen page. You could also adjust the number of entities for dynamic rotation which should boost the graphics performance. HTH,

Do I hear an upgrade to X2 coming.....

leave it to MasterShake to one up us. Just kidding. Thanks MasterShake.

Hi Thad, I thought you might like some icons to go with your scripts. You have mail. Thanks,

What are you trying to reverse with drill points? the point order? Are you talking about contouring by chance?

You could also write a VB script for each Gview command and include a call to fit screen. Then use script linker to create a new button for each script. I know its a lot of work, but it would get you what you want. HTH,