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.

Currently using negative offsets. The shop in general doesn't have a clue as to what a pre-setter is for. Never tried a negative offset without a g43 either. "I don't agree with this part of his statement, if that's the issue there are "bigger" problems to correct." I agree with the disagreement. After seeing code a few hundred times a month, someone all the sudden forgets to add a g43 next to the H callout? Kind of like forgetting to breath , isn't it? In 20 years of machining, I've never seen a controller miss a g43 callout. Is that even possible? No scrap and quick. Work with him for a few. New concepts usually seem awkward at first.

Can groups be masked for chaining? Sounds like a good idea for selecting geometry on a 3d wireframe. Sometimes, masking kulurs an using levuls just dont get it.

The setting is there, I also don't think it works as I also receive that error on loading programs. The Haas usually alarms and then truncates the code, but the program is still solid. I edit the heading before saving the file and sending it to the machine.

John. The code that shuts off that D offset for the drills, is that for the heading or is he getting D values in the g code itself? MPmaster?

Rechaining takes what, about 15 seconds? Including the sip of coffee.

Nice link.

Just messin with ya Thad, and yes yes, all the time.

That's pretty geeky Thad.

Break the chain in sections prior to either operation, then only select what you need. All these task that your asking about are relatively simple and can be answered by merely looking at all the parameters in the dialog boxes and messing with them. Your taking the fun out of learning this software and missing a good learning experience.

Lotta baloney going on here. Just download the mpmaster post and give it a shot. Max and min for the entire program gets stated , as well as individual tools. You'll probably want to # out the statements you don't need. This post works good with a Fanuc 18I and Haas controls.

Speaking of defragging, I been using a program called Perfect disk for about 3 months now. It runs in the background and uses very little resources. As of the moment, I can say that I've had no problems with it, general computer usage is fine, and I got the defrag monkey off my back.

Turn off autosave. Save manually, frequently. In version X, Autosave and backplot were the culprits in most of my MC crashes. Tweak your Windows OS and perform regular maintenance. A good comp, finely tuned, will produce good results with MC.

Sorry I did not get back with you guys sooner. I ended up re-installing X+ with the default .mtb, then saved as a custom .mtb. All is good again. I'll try that next time Gunther, thanks.

Sure does. I'm trying to squeeze a new monitor out of them now. I'll try that when I get to work. There is only one version loaded. Thanks .

I down graded monitors from a 21" to a 17" (OUCH) and my X+ toolbar wont maximize. I can see it, move it and so on, but it stays the same size, very small with no actually icons to select, almost like a single new toolbar button. Visual themes were disabled in the Mastercam advanced properties dialog box. Any clues here as to what may be taking place?

8gb? 64bit OS? How did you arrive at those specs as being required for MC? SB x-fi and Z-4, gaming gear. As for X3 running on Vista, I'd take a wait and see approach, at least till X3, SP7, MR4 comes out. Let the others test the waters.

Beat ya by a minute on that last one JP. Ya must have been on the throne

Keygen? That's usually associated with cracked software. The educational version X that came with a book I purchased never displayed those messages. Also, I dont think you can take a full version and convert it for educational use, but I could be wrong.

For those that may be confused, programming from centerline of rot x0, z0, are fixed values and usually are inputted in all the wpc's with the Y axis being the only variable. Minor adjustments is the key word here. We usually only deviate from true centerline when a machine is cold or a location is off abit and we have to maintain concentricity between bores.

If its a single large part/casting, I would use cl of rot.

Select a straight line entry in the lead in dialog box (which is a default, I believe) as well as arc, that will solve it. Forget about adding g41 to the line before the arc as mastercam will do this for you.