WHOA. 3 guys in a row from michigan replied. Ya, we rock.

In the top cplane, draw the 1.378 dia tube in the vertical then draw the angle slice where it needs to be in the top plane.

Create an extruded surface on the tube (Create, surface, create extruded surface). Delete the "end cap" surfaces then use xform rotate to rotate it so that the slice is horizontal. (Front cplane). Your slice should now be horizontal.

Create, surface, trim surface, trim surfaces to a plane. Select the surfaces, then select the slice(horizontal line) as your plane. Disgard the upper portion of the tube if MC has not done so already.

Now, go to Create, create curve, create curve on one edge. Select the new surfaces to create the oval. Move all the other lines and surfaces to another level and check your oval for gaps. Create more curves if needed. Repeate for the tube OD.

"I think what all of this proves is anyone needing SERIOUS number crunching and using ANYTHING less than a 1333FSB chip and 12 megs of L2 cache is going to be in for LONG waits."

Heh, or get another Cam package.

I've never been able to see the threads in verify either, even though make true threads in the settings is checked. I just verify the nc output before sending out to the machine.

The G in front of the 1/4-19 tells us its British. There's also a Japanese version with this same pitch as well. I'll drl (.4531) & tap a piece of scrap and see how it goes.

I have a G 1/4-19 thread to cut. Major dia. is .5131, minor dia. is .4506. This plugs a .3937 dia. hole. Do I have to drill the minor dia. for the pipe tap, or does the tap actually cut it? If I have to drill the minor, are there depth limits? No data on this print related to this. Thanks.

Best learning experience? Try running in demo mode for a few months. This will put a damper on careless oversights very quickly.

A supervisor of mine, who has no experience in MC what so ever, responded to a problem I was having with MC by stating "Maybe you just need to flip some switches". LOL, he was so right, I've been flipping switches so often and seeing new things so frequently that they add exponentially to my skill set, always applicable to potential challenges in the future.

CNC apps guy: My thoughts and experience exactly, it's like your reading my mind.

"Spend as much time as you can "playing" with the software. You kind of have to think like a kid in this respect, kids learn by playing."

" Or, take work home. I know the thought of that just does not sit well with everyone but I probably programmed several dozen parts at home before any of my programs ever cut a single chip. I used to sneak into the office and copy blueprints (nothing that was sensitive) then take them home for learning."

I do that all the time, and yes, the guys at work work ride me for it. But when they need to know something , who has the answers most of the time? ME ME ME. Aside from that, I'm not doing it for the company, I'm doing it for my benefit, testing new knowledge and theories on their dime, perpetually adding to my bag O tricks. No college or schooling can even come close to this type of learning experience. Whether or not they choose to compensate me for the experience I'm gaining is irrelevant. I can take it with me. Nuff said.

I've created lines on the surfaces edges, (create curves), then used Xform offset contour set to an amount that equals half the BNE plus a few tenths. Some trimming is usually in order and the splines can get a little wacky but using those lines / arcs as a boundary works pretty decent with regards to keeping the tool from rolling over the edges of surfaces.

Oh, I see, no thanks to the Minion or Hardmill?

Just a thought. Take some time and occasionally set up one of your own programs with the set up man standing right there watching. Run it and see how it performs. I never program in a fashion that would be good for me but unacceptable to others. And yes, I do catch snafus in my own code. There's nothing more humbling than having the $hit hit the fan when a co-worker or worse yet, Management is standing right there when it happens.

As far as tightening bolts, bad wpc shifts and so on, you can't hold their hands all day long. Grin and bear it when its not your fault. Ditto the seat time.

Use print screen. Go to paint. Select paste. Crop the image. Your done.

I'd sooner poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick rather than pay big bucks for the upper end Quadros, just to test a theory, only to come back here and rag about it later. The Nvidia 8800GT, at about 25% the cost, seems to be fine according to the peeps in the benchmark post.

Thanks.

Collin mentioned this in another post.

"Check your Flow parameters. The cut direction can be set the same for 11 of the 16 surfaces, the surfaces near the Top (in ISO view) have different UV directions, so they can't be used in the same Flowline operation."

Is there a simple way to check UV directions?

Can they be changed or reversed without recreating the surface?

I occasionally run into flowline problems with abrupt directional changes in the middle of cutter paths. I'm thinking the UV's may be the problem.

Don't think so.

"A micrometre (American spelling: micrometer; symbol µm) is one millionth of a metre, or equivalently one thousandth of a millimetre. It is also commonly known as a micron. It can be written in scientific notation as 1×10−6 m, meaning 1/1 000 000 m."

He said UM, thats incredably fine. I wasn't aware that sinker edm's could achive such a fine finish.

Some spotfaceing tools can achive relatively fine finishes, rigidity being a must. I might try fine boring for the sides, radiused nose of course, and a 2 flute e-mill ground .002 under dia. Knock 1 of the flutes off, then grind the remaining flute flat, with a 3 deg. primary relief, followed by a 7 deg. secondary relief, making sure that the remaining flute barely comes across centerline, thus avoiding a xxxx in the center of the spotface. SLOW speed and light feed with a dwell should do the trick. Leave the bottom of the bore heavy, and mess with it untill you achive the finish your after.

MLS, is there a way to set the radius size that gets rolled on the corners?

Try to find lathe turning data for that material and apply that to the boring bar s&f.

+ or - .0002 is fairly tight. Reaming or burnishing may be an alternative worth investigating.

Just thought I'd add this. For verification purposes, you could dupe the opp, use a sharp cornered emill and cut .001 above the floor, the change tool color option in verify SHOULD highlight any high spots, although some times in verify, I have noticed that with walls in particular, setting a rougher to cut at plus .005, then a finisher, (different tool), set at .000 in a separate opp, I,ll see no color change at all and this gets me aggravated quickly as I now have to check all my settings and post code for the tools machining the opp then crunch some numbers to verify that I did indeed leave stock for clean-up. Sometimes I wish I had Vericut, but then again it shouldn't have to be this way in the first place.

Thad. 6:37 AM. Dedication indeed. I very rarely use the pocketing op., almost always use contour with either a finish pass in the same opp, or I'll dupe the opp and use a fresh cutter. This takes a few more clicks on the calc and messing with the lead in/out options but it seems to produce better results, for me anyways. I've yet to come across a situation where 70% hasn't cleaned up a floor. More often than not though, the number of radial passes set in multipass dictates the step over percentage and I ensure that it doesn't exceed 70%. Bean counters here don't know how to use MC and are not able to calculate the cycle time difference between 58% or 70% step over, but we do piece work here and play it a little safer. Nothing stinks more than pulling a part out of a vise or tearing down a open set-up, seeing a cusp, then having to rerun it with a smaller step over or get out the small stones.

[ 08-30-2008, 10:21 AM: Message edited by: MotorCityMinion ]

Heh, 201!

Excuse me for being naive, same guy? "Mr. Dingle Berry, ahem, NeilJ, ahem Jon Banquer"

What's a FOGBLOG? Can someone post a link?

Seems like negative feedback to his post is actually feeding this monster. Perhaps silence is the best course of action.

There are a lot of things I hate about Mastercam, and the forum has nothing to do with it. In fact, It provides relief. I've never outright bashed MC, nor would I ever consider doing it here. When in Rome / don't $H1T in the kitchen. Practice and persistence are the keys to overcoming my shortcomings with the software and until my employer decides to use different software, I might as well make the best of it.

ALMOST 200

Rectangular boundry? Mayby a boundry established by create curves at the top of the shape, then offset it by the cutter rad. and make it water tight.

Thad, as a general rule of thumb, I use 70% of the effective cutter dia. to generate clean cutter paths on bottom surfaces. I also use large rad inserts for most roughing opps, .156 being my fav for tool life. That 1.50 dia. cutter with .236 rads should work out to be around ... (1.50 -.236 -.236) x .70 = .72 width of cut or 48% step over. Try a smaller rad to bump up the stepover. If your pinned to using that large of a rad, a finish pass in a seperate opp with a smaller step over and slightly higher feedrate may be the way to go to avoid adding to much time to the cycle.

It's also a fixed value. Has nothing to do with the wpc Z value or the workpiece face. You can actually eyeball it with a scale, tool tip to spindle nose. Tool presetters, stand alone units or machine installed units, measure this value. The better stand alone units come with optical comparators for checking nose radius and angles as well. They also check tool diameters fairly accurately. They are calibrated with a standard that is set to a known length and usually ground at the center for setting the cl.

Try this: Take a 123 block and place it on the table top of a vertical machine or the edge of a pallet on a horizontal. Now touch off the spindle nose to block and origin out your Z. (Zero it). Back off the z and put a tool in the spindle. Now touch off the tool to the 123 block. The number will be positive and that is the gage length were talking about here.

This is what the stand alone units do , just quicker and out of the machine. In top notch shop with a crib, the crib attendant will set the tools before they get to your machine.

Schools out, miller time.