4 hours ago, Newbeeee™ said:

OP said his friend always gets the latest sent to him. So by that statement, I assume he is paying annual maintenance...which is a HUGE amount of wasted corn

Maintenance didn't kick in till X

Prior to that you paid for each major update as it was released so you could go 18 months to 2 years + without having to write a check.

Still, in rough back of a napkin guestimates, you'll looking at north of $40K to keep a full seat current all these years.

You'd think whoever was writing those checks would expect an ROI of some sort. Seems kind of weird.

At any rate the options are clear

1. Buy a nethasp license if they will sell you a 1 seat net hasp 

2. Build a Win 3.1 machine , V9 ran well on Win2000 and even XP.. I don't know about V8

3. learn to use a modern version that will run on a modern OS.

     This seems the simplest and cheapest course of action IMO

4 hours ago, byte said:

I bet you paid less for mill than I did for that mill entry license i bought at the time

Probably.. I was moving from TekSoft/ProCad97 to Mastercam and received a very nice competitive

discount. About a year later I bought the 3D mill module (which included the legacy 5X toolpaths)

and finally I added the solids module, which was an option in those days

V9 and older versions will not run on a usb or older hasp.

Modern OS's will not recognize the hasp.

There is a solution, but it will not be cheap

V9 and older will run on a nethasp ( network license)

To get it running you would have to convert your usb hasp to a nethasp 

Once you have the net hasp setup you will be able to run V8.1, but I don't know if they will even sell you a 1 seat nethasp.

Other than that, your only choice is to learn a more recent version of Mastercam

5 hours ago, Jobnt said:

Or was it 7?

V7 was my introduction to Mastercam

I purchased a seat of 2d lathe and mill in 1997.

What are the specs on your video card

also

go into your Verify settings and make sure it is set to always use the 5 axis engine

Most of the parts I do are too big to generate a stock model

I run them through verify, save them as STL files and use those to make stock models

It would be nice to maintain the associativity you get from a stock model, but in most cases

It just doesn't work for me. The files become too big, too cumbersome and too slow.

is there a way to flip it the other way??

7 minutes ago, byte said:

i see the aladdin license monitor can still be downloaded & installed,

They were bought out in 2010, but I am wrong

Hasps are still being supported. 

I do remember looking a couple of years ago and not being able to find them, but here they are

Software Monetization Drivers and Downloads | HASP Drivers (thalesgroup.com)

A dumb question ... did you have your old hasp plugged in when you ran the install

If so...clean everything out and try it without the hasp

If the install is successful, then work on getting the hasp recognized.

HASPs are going away, I believe all new sales come with digital licenses.

I suspect if I lost my USB hasp (or if it died) I would be forced to replace it with a digital license

1 hour ago, byte said:

It works fine for me,  are there existing files from the old install?

are you using a hash or a software license

Alladin got bought out years ago and the new owners are no longer selling or supporting 

the HASPs we use for Mastercam

I believe this is a brand new laptop that has never had MC installed

this is not an import/export issue

the points were  created in Catia, the spline was created using the points, and it's wrong

it may very well be a tolerance issue though

I'll check it out

Thanks

Our Catia designer is drawing up a model and he thought the spline he got from those points is wrong

and asked me to check it out.

He was right, the spline is not correct... Catia is doing that spline wrong, Mastercam, SolidWorks, Spaceclaim and hyperMill

are doing it correctly.

I thought is very strange that Catia would make a mess of something so simple and I assume we have a setting wrong in Catia,

but I have no idea what.

Making splines like this is something we do hundreds of times a week here. 

I've never seen one go bad like this before... 

Here's a weird one

See the two attached files. 

Each is a step file containing  some points and a spline

The points came from a customer and define a lathe profile we will machine

The Catia file spline is wrong ( see the section the red arrows point too)

The Mastercam file has a spline created by the Auto Spline command and it matches our customer's spline.

SolidWorks does it correctly too.

Our Cati designer knows his business and he's baffled 

Any Catia guys know what's going on here??

We've dropped our Catia maintenance  ($60k/year) so sending this to Catia support is out. LOL

CATIA_SPLINE.stp MC2023_SPLINE.stp

Back in the day which video drivers you ran could be a very big deal.

The wrong drivers could cause problems from minor glitches to rendering your software completely nonfunctional

Nowdays, it doesn't seem to matter. I just run Nvidia's latest greatest and don't worry about it.

SolidWorks yells at me because I'm not using "SW Certified Drivers", but I ignore it and never have any problems.

One thing I always do with Dell workstations is uninstall the Dell drivers and replace them with Nvidia drivers.

this is how to do it old school

use the curve/spiral command to draw a spiral representing the C/L of your tool

then use the command Break Many/arcs . Some experimentation will be required to get the tolerance right so you have a smooth

toolpath made up of arcs, not a million tiny point to point lines

Chain it,  set the toolpath to C/L and call it a day

Did you run it on a PC that has access to a Mastercam license?

or

it is possible your firewall is blocking it 

1 hour ago, byte said:

That is so far from true you have no idea, he complains about loads of other things as well!

Yup, he'd b!tch about it if you hung him with a new rope 

I would use wear.

Control comp is going to bite you

I would thread mill that.

In my experience the odds of tapping 61 NPT holes in 304 SS successfully are near zero

Carmex thread mill wizard

1 hour ago, Hertz said:

Good morning, I'm trying to add a fillet in the bottom of this hole, and when I select constant fillet and the size, it works, except it goes reverse. The fillet goes down on the sides instead of up. Is there a way to reverse the direction of the fillet?

are you selecting the bottom edge or the face of the hole?

44 minutes ago, Jobnt said:

I will have to verify I can change this without affecting anything else.

This setting will not change posted code.

It just changes rapid moves in Verify and Machin Sim backplot

Classic backplot  can not accurately simulate dogleg rapids

This is not a Mastercam issue, it is a programming issue

You have Mastercam set to rapid in a straight line and  apparently, your machine dogleg rapids.

If you set your machine definition per Rekd's instructions, Verify will dogleg and show you the gouges.

When you are running dynamic mill toolpaths, or optitough surfacing paths on a machine that

doglegs, make sure you set your rapid motion to G01 F (whatever your machine can handle).

Then the machine will travel in as straight line when you are down in a pocket  or dynamically milling a part.

Yes.. 

about 10 years ago, I came to work and my entire department was down.

Mastercam would not launch on any of the programming computers.

I finally figured out the cause. 

Windows Update had updated the Quadro drivers on all our machines overnight.

I uninstalled them had replaced them with Nvidia drivers and we were back in business,

Now we have a script excluding video drivers updates on programming PC's.

3 minutes ago, byte said:

I recommend customers to use GEForce experience to ensure the drivers are up to date with the best drivers, Microsoft windows does not do a good job at getting the latest drivers in my experience 

Dell Quadro and GEForce drivers are notoriously bad as well.

1 hour ago, Jobnt said:

Great info, thanks. 

I'm very familiar with Volumill (GibbScam) and most of the settings you mentioned are there. My biggest hurdle I think is setting the chaining correctly. Once I figure that out I'll prolly quit asking so many stupid questions.

 

Chaining Dynamic milling toolpaths is counterintuitive, at least it is to me.

The machining region will normally be your stock.

Avoidance regions are normally your finished part (ie you want to avoid cutting it) 

Air regions are exactly what they say they are.

Once you get the hang of it, you can do some pretty amazing stuff by manipulating the machining and avoidance region chains

12 minutes ago, Colin Gilchrist said:

Congratulations, I started with 6.1.3.

I took 3 semesters programming at Saddleback Community College using V5

I thought it was pretty cool at the time, but looking back, it was very primitive.

Anyone else remember MCTV??

I started doing actual work with Mastercam in V7, in 1998 (?)