IMHO, Doosan have good value and are a bit more rugged than the comparable priced American made machines (that now have a F1 team) In addition the Doosan has Fanuc controls that most people are familiar with. Furthermore, with Ellison Technologies the distributor now it will be hard to find better support of your new machine tool. Doosan isn't on a Mori or Okuma level but pretty close for a lot less money. that's my 2¢ Cheers! Len Dye

Like JParis said "G31 is your friend", I put a G31 skip move on the G43 line that way it's controlled by the federate override instead of being a rapid move. ex: G31 G43 H24 Z5. F200. From there on out, use your protected positioning cycle, unless you are using a measuring cycle Good Luck! Len Dye

both of our MSX501 & MSX511 are Fanuc. On machines that are less than a year old, 1 is Fanuc and another is Mitsubishi this control designation isn't used anymore.

I used to train on new CMM installs and my preference was to have a dedicated tip calibration program to go along with the inspection program for each job. This way there was no question to "are all the tip positions calibrated and accurate" Too many times us mill guys get CMM results back that are bogus due to bad probe calibration leaving us scratching our heads going around in circles to trouble shoot. It doesn't make sense to me to calibrate a bunch of tip positions that will never be used as it takes some 20 hours to calibrate all the various positions of an articulating probe head just for 1 tip. Also on part alignment I would train them to take some manual points on the part to get a rough alignment prior to running DCC that way it's not as crucial to replicate the setup back to where it was when it was initially programmed. I'm not involved with the CMM where I'm at now but they typically don't do a manual alignment prior to but rather duplicate. IMHO regardless how good your documentation etc you can still have problems especially portability over from machine to another and such. that's my 2¢ cheers! Len Dye

The 2 NV5000's that I checked have a different control designation than yours, one is a MSX501 and the other is a MSX511 so that might be why yours don't have the "user memory" storage area?? I never found the settings that Ranger Dan mentioned on any of our MAPPS machines either Go to "setting", "comm setting", "network IO", "server detail". Set the first column to "permit" sorry I wasn't much help! Len Dye

there's another setting that would prevent you from seeing the PC hard drive along with the one previously mentioned by "Ranger Dan" go to "Setting" then #5 "Operation Mode" and make sure Tape Mode is set to MAPPS-DNC when this is set to DNC(RS232) it doesn't display the PC hard drive, I tried it on an older machine with one of the 1st versions of MAPPS cheers! Len Dye

When in "Tape" mode press "Program List" and you should be looking at the PC hard drive. I've never known it to be an option however I haven't worked for the dealer in few years now. On an older Fanuc 31i there is 1 gig and on a newer 31i there is 7 gig. Also on our horizontal with Mitsubishi control there's 69 megabytes cheers! Len Dye

On the MAPPS controls for long programs that don't fit in the main memory we use the "User Memory" on the PC side, it has several gigabytes of storage and you can edit and search etc.. cheers! Len Dye

I used to work for the Mori dealer and on the 1st versions of MAPPS I think they used 386 processors or something cuz it was sloowww! On a demo machine we had figured out how to change .bat file so it would boot up Fanuc but Mori put out a memo about a week later so we had to stop Len Dye

If you have a precision test bar with the #40 taper shank you could check runout of the spindle. If not, then setup a test block that won't distort and bore an equal sized hole to see if it comes out round. On some thin walled parts, regardless of light you clamp them it will still distort them. Cheers! Len Dye

DPRNT example formatted like a CMM report DPRNT.zip

I never really liked Renishaw's format of their reports so I wrote a DPRNT macro that looks more like a CMM report. Basically it sets the Z orgin at the face and the X & Y Orgin at some point like a bore or intersection. It basically probes something then prints it then probe something else then prints, opening & closing the RS232 port as it goes along. It prints the current date and serial number that was engraved on the part too. With the ASCII output format it can then be imported into Excel using comma separated values and you can do SPC stuff, max/min & average etc. With conditional formatting in the spreadsheet dimensions out of tolerance turn red etc. For the Operators the spreadsheet format makes it even quicker and easier to read than the CMM style report and way easier than Renishaws format. With a lot of dimensions the easier it is for the operator the better, that's what we're here for right? The forum doesn't allow me to upload the example but if someone is interested, let me know and we'll figure it out how to get it to you. Cheers! Len Dye

We routinely finish keller heat treated stainless at 500-1000 SFM and up to .010 IPT so a 1/2" ball end mill will be over 150 IPM. However your tool can't be running into to other features at that high of feed rate. We typically finish the adjacent profiles prior to finishing the surfaces this way your tool doesn't run into them when finishing the surfaces. There are times I even trim the surfaces and shorten them up by .010 or so as to prevent the tool from leaving small gouges caused from the servos over-shooting at the higher feed rates. Definitely use high speed look ahead if you have it and any time you can post G2/G3 do so because the servos will typically get to the programmed feed rate faster than point to point on most controls. Also if you're going to do a lot of kellering it can be cost effective to have your servos tuned to optimize the acceleration/deceleration. Most machine tool builders use a generic parameter set for their servos and don't optimize them on each machine built. Also a 4 flute end mill will have twice the feed rate of a 2 flute so the more flutes the better, it only takes about 6 seconds for tool change, so put in a multi-fluted tool when ever you can. Cheers! Len Dye

thanks Ron, I downloaded your 4-axis Vertical machine to start learning Machine Simulation, hey that looks like our part in the pic!

the link is broken, is there another place to download the Benchmark file?

possibly someone could answer a question for me regarding MasterCam's Simulator (I've search prior articles and didn't find anything): Currently I'm on X9 and the stop condition function for both 'Stop at operation change' & 'Stop at tool change' seem to work the same. I recall using this on X7 and it worked good however at X8 it didn't work either. If I select stop at tool change it stops at operation change, so essentially both functions stop at operation change. Is there something that changed or that I'm missing?? I believe this newer simulator came out in X7?? it really didn't run any faster than the old simulator but was much cleaner and I could see its' potential. However, when X8 came out it really start blazing really fast in comparison. Possibly it wasn't until X8 that the simulator started to utilize my processor and graphics?? I tend to spend a lot of simulating offline as opposed to testing it out at the machine (very costly). These newer versions that are starting to use the processors and graphics better have save my company a bunch of loot so I'm happy. Some kind of g-code simulator would be nice but hard to justify where I'm at currently. Thanks!