So... is the Adaptive Clearing toolpath to be included in X3? Jay

Thanks JM2C, I hate to be always asking questions but I'm still in the newbie mode. This is good advice. My parts need to go through 5 operations, so next question is: When designing up the fixture, should I design it so all 5 ops are on the same plate, and I just cycle parts through the various stages on the plate; or one plate per operation and I swap plates each time I run the batch through. Batch sizes range from 100-500 parts. My table size is 40"x20" so the plates would be too big to manhandle. I guess the same would apply for multiple 2-Jaw Kurt vises on the table. Jay

Hi, I'm trying to plan a fixture plate design of small parts on my mill. The raw stock start out as 1" round bar by 6" long. When I design a plate to hold multiple pieces, should I design for maximum part density on the fixture plate - which means using small tools, or should I open up the spacing between parts a bit to allow for larger tools. I'm looking for schools of thought on this one. Thanks Jay

..any news?

I'm milling along the length. Since my raw stock is round bar and the part I need to mill out is smaller than the bar... This sounds like a bug to me. But thanks for the work-around. Jay

Hi, I'm trying to use the face mill toolpath to mill a flat onto round bar stock. I create the round stock model, then try to build a face toolpath by simply hitting the green check mark during chain selection. However I get a message saying "Stock Boundry is not defined". Any thoughts what I may have done wrong? Thanks Jay

The executable unzips and drops files into the mcamx dir (I believe). Then you need to follow the instructions in the text file to change .SET files within MasterCAM. Jay

Wide Scren monitors always look their best when you run them at the native resolution for the monitor, use a good video card with good drivers, and use a digital cable for signal. Jay

Ah! the Pinewood derby fun! My 2 sons and I did a couple of cars over the years, we won both regional and district races in Vancouver back then. The kids (as well as Dad) had lots of fun. Jay

I could have just as easily said Camworks, SolidCAM and Camworks are the only ones that plug into solidworks and have wire, mill, lathe.. all the pieces I need. Jay

Yah Yah I'm not a dealer, I'm just a small shop trying to crank out parts.. but when I did my product research, it came in second behind MasterCAM, hence I went out and bought MasterCAM Jay

The existing CAM products have hyped up the Solidworks integration market to a frenzy, but no one could deliver a good full featured CAM product. That is until now! SolidCAM's phenomenal growth is what everyone including investors are watching. To not jump into that market when you're the encumbant is risking missing the boat. A long time ago the Railroad companies used to rule the contintent, until trucking started picking up speed, pretty soon trucking was moving more freight than the Railroads and they almost went broke. What the Railroad companies hadn't realised was they were in the "transportation" business, not the "railroad" business, they didn't adapt to the market and it almost sunk them. I recently went through the evaluation cycle trying to pick the best CAM that would work along side my Solidworks and lamented the fact that there was no decent CAM plug-in for Solidworks. It irritates the heck out of me that I needed to learn two drafting systems, when all I wanted was best of breed CAD/CAM, discrete and integrated. In fact I believe the old argument that you need separate CAD for the engineering office and shop floor starts to wain when you think about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with a tightly integrated and competitively priced product. Jay

I'm running Vista on all my computers now. There's been some growing pain and it definitely requires optimization to get it to run smoothly (re: good video drivers which are now out). Also ensuring the auto level increase is turned on so your not always asked the "accept or deny" questions. Also when you map network drives, ensure you map them in the enhanced (administrator) level as well to avoid some network programs from not running right. My personal laptop is a Dell M90 running 4 GB of RAM. The biggest "hog" part that folks notice is the system loading the cache everytime it's restarted, and the indexing going on. The trick is to never turn off your computer, just put it into sleep mode. Jay ..resistance is futile.. you will be assimulated.

Hmm.. too bad, well if anyone is interested I've got the Vista driver (version 163.75), it works great with my Dell Laptop, it should also work with desktop NVidia cards as well. It's about 31 MB. Not sure where to upload it to though. Jay

So I saw that last thread about Vista graphics, not sure what happened there, but I've been hammering this subject pretty heavy myself. I've found that for NVidia cards to get any sort of performance you need to go to www.laptopvideo2go.com and get their latest drivers.. what an eye opener! I went to the trouble of loading a fresh copy of XP, and the latest drivers from the site, benched it then blew it all away and loaded Vista Business and the latest drivers from the site, and benched it.. and wouldn't you know it Vista was faster under OpenGL (which is all I tested). Dell M90 4 GB RAM. But getting the right driver can be tricky because the NVidia driver numbering scheme leads to confusion. Jay

I also use the Space Navigator, I really like it in Solidworks, but I haven't fully got the hang of it in Mastercam yet. Does it have a setting to spin your model around the center of mass like in Solidworks? Jay

What I'd like to see is a dual Opteron system try this benchmark, this is what we load our math crunching servers with for best performance.

quote: 8 min. 5 sec. Dell M90 2.16 2 gig RAM 667 Mhz Win XP Pro Quadro FX2500M I would expect at least a 10% advantage wit the the 2.16 GHz cpu over my 2.0 GHZ CPU ( The CPU's are more like "1968 MHz" and rounded up to 2GHz. So bottom line, as fast of CPU you can get, and at even better at least two of them on the same motherboard. This is how we spec hardware for any sort of CPU intensive but single threaded application. Jay

quote: Have you configured your Graphics card to use the solidworks performance and quality profile and selected the CAD desktop profile? These two settings work like magic on the FX 2500M. The other thing you might want to do is set the affinity of Mastercam to the 2nd core processor. I didn't set the affinity or the process priority for my test though I changes the video setting on my M90 as per the above, made only a 1 sec difference - as expected since this test is purely CPU intensive. Jay

10 min 2 sec Dell M90 Laptop T2500 (dual core 2.0 GHz) 2 GB RAM FX 2500 Nvidia GeForce 512 MB Windows XP Jay

quote: The University IT dept. formats the HD of all PC's when new so my M90 has a fresh install of WinXP Pro with no Dell crapware in sight. I suggest you do the same. Careful, not all of Dell's crapware is bad. Make sure you have all of the latest drivers from their support site as it is this that really ties the O/S to the hardware and wrings out every last drop of performance. One of the big reasons Alienware is so powerful is due to driver optimization. When they do a build with the O/S they focus on getting the right drivers installed and tuned. Other more general tuning tips: - *ALWAYS!!* get the fastest possible hard drives, today that would the the 7200RPM's I don't think the 15,000 RPM drives are available for laptops yet. - Opt for the faster memory (whatever the brand), min 2GB - The fastest CPU's are always painfully expense use your judgment there. - Keep only essential applications on your laptop, every application loads data into the registry, the bigger the registry, the slower the system. - I always splurge for the fasted video regardless of the price. These are safe things, for the more radical types try www.xptuneup.com FYI: Dell now has the Wireless N cards available for their precision series laptops, I just got mine couriered from them for my M90. Jay

ok this may be weird - asking about Camworks in a mastercam forum... I've read the thread regarding Solidcam, good comments. I'm wondering does anyone here have any experience with Camworks - it boasts the same Solidworks Gold Status as SolidCam. I've asked folks here also earlier regarding the Esprit package. It's nice to get a feel for other packages to compare and see how MasterCam is doing in the marketplace. Jay

..any thoughts? It seems that Esprit has a lot of the features of Mastercam and is strong in the MATTS functionality.