Hey, Bullines, how are you shipping- FED-up waiting for-EX PURO-sometime-LATER Snail-mail?

RStuart, does your cad file have surfaces?, if not can they be created easily? You can do a lot with projecting curves-offset with Level 1 mill. If you can email the file to me i'd be happy to take a look at it Steve

Salem, I don't know why you are having problems with this file. I read it in O.K., analyzed the surfaces no probleb, and just hit regenerate toolpaths. seemed to work fine. I put Salem_1.zip up on Cadcams ftp site with the toolpaths. Hope this helps Steve

Thanks Murlin that works. Rekd, the post is set up like that. program name inside the file is ok, but we need the file as seen in Windows explorer to be lower case. Thanks anyway.

Thanks Murlin, I'll try anything right now

Hey guys, anyone know where to change the file extention "nc" to lower case ?. We just installed a new puter with win2k, and the files have nc in upper case. we didn't have this problem on the old puter which was running NT.

Bruce, given the geometry you have, you have to create a miimum of three surfaces on each end. you have to decide whether to use existing geometry or break up some of the lines. the surfaces wil be facets with sharp corners at the common edges. HTH

Phil, if you take a look at my geometry, you will see that i rotated the small arc 180 degrees, so that the end points of both arcs are on the outside. If you don't, then the surface will be twisted. Steve

El, I emailed you a file. Also put it up on the FTP site in the solids folder. solid_taper.zip. Best looking result was creating a swept surface, 2 flats to close it off, and then solid from surfaces.

Leandro, when you project a curve onto a surface the result will be an aproximation only, especialy if the result is an arc as opposed to a spline. If you create 3 points along the red arc, and then project those points onto the surface, and then create an arc from those 3 surface points, they will have the same center and radius. Hope this is of help to you. Steve

Thanks, tried second one and it works fine.

Chris, I just tried it out and the warning message for levels greater then 255 comes up, but it won't end. Hit ok and it just comes back.This is for the first one, didn't try the second yet.

Jeremy, I noticed that when i select 'window' the default setting is set to "In+intr". If left there all entities are selected. change it to "Inside" only, and it should work. This may be a minor bug, because if i repeat this action, it defaults to In+intr again.

Jeremy, in set mask, select - clear all entities, ( turn them off ) and only check the color box.

Karl, I put up a file called surface fillet blend. I created some cross sections through the spoke and wall surfaces and then create,spline,blend, broke up the long splines on the original fillet at the intersctions, and created a coons surface, 10 x 1. Looks reasonably smooth. Steve

Turn on only the levels you want to delete. screen should be blank. main menu, screen, blank unblank, all entities. now you can delete anything you want. if you have parent surfaces, then you may delete surfaces you have on other levels. best thing is to pick an unused level, like 255, and move all the unblanked entities to it. then blank all of them.

Thats what i thought. Thanks Jay

In hardcopy function, is it possible to only print out the file name without the date. I looked in mill9.cfg and .txt, but can't see where to make the change. Steve

Jeff, I uploaded a file to the ftp site called MAS_SUB NEST BLOCK-LEFT SIDE ONLY.ZIP. This file wasn't too bad to work with. I created surfaces from the small solid on the left side, then changed colours of the surfaces that would be on the bottom of the cavity. Next, I create curve, parting line on only those sufaces. I then had to create some edge curves where there were no parting lines found. some areas were a little funky, so i had to blend in the splines and arcs until i had chainable geometry. then i squashed the curves flat to z zero in the front plane, and did a solid extrude cut through the large solid. this will give you a toolpath boundary to work with. Now you should be able to isolate only the surfaces you want to cut in the cavity. The other file is a real pig. You are going to have to create surfaces from individual sheet solids, or as Murlin said, get the customer to send a new solid. This second file took me almost an hour to translate into mastercam, first one only took a minute or so. Hope this helps you out somewhat. Steve

Travis, the surface has a wrinkle in it. If you analyze dynamic and drag your cursor down from the top edge slowly, you will see it jump suddenly. There is a lot of "noise" in the surface in this area and that makes it difficult to project onto. Have a look at the goemetry used to create the suface and see if you can reduce the number of control points on the splines.

Ed, If you go to Screen, Surf disp, Density, you can choose density of any or all surfaces that are on the screen

Neal, I emailed you a file

No problems so far with the update. ran a test this morning. before update 49 min process time on surface finish contour, after update 11 min. Now my guys are upset cause i told them they don't need new computers ! Hope this speed change will apply to all toolpaths in VX to you guys at CNC

Got to keep the boys happy. Each operator has their own seat of MC, and do all their own programming. For one prog die they will write up to about 300 programs.

Yea, i was leaning toward the Quadros. We just got a 500 on one workstation and i like it better than my oxygen card