Assuming that you (jspangler), are using "Mastercam" to program this mill and thus the reason for posting on the "Mastercam" board is so, I'll put in my 2 bits. With Haas you get what you pay for and after spec'ing out a fully loaded VF-6 and being dissapointed at the machines inherent lack of stability and 4 service calls in the first month of use, I got a check for $10 and a t-shirt from Gene. I'll admit their Yasnac/Fanuc clone control is really good though. The service personel that come from the factory directly used to know what they were doing but the people who come from their new "factory service centers" are in sore need of additional experience and are very often thrust into the feild while still taking classes. Aparently they don't stock those funky 40 volt beacon lamps in ther vans either. Have you ever been to the factory? ever notice that the Haas product is made on Hitachi-Seiki cells?. Makes one wonder. Notice also Haas's mind numbing aray of new machines to have surfaced within the last 6 months, maybe a little too much expansion and not enough focus on being a service oriented company? I saw this happen with Mitutoyo back in the day. I'm sorry you got burned though and I hope the factory takes care of you. If it were my machine company that made the thing you'd have another one shipped to your door free of charge. I have found the Haas machines to be good "entry level" machines but when a bit more muscle is needed they fall short. We have a 17 yr old Mori-Seiki MV45/40 (my favorite) with less then half the power, a feeble control, and a not very rapid, rapid feed rate, that is pretty much unstoppable. We take ground shaking cuts with this thing that make our Haas's skip across the floor, granted this mill has 7 boxed ways on it and is nearly double the weight of our VF-4 and doesn't have a sand filled head casting like our VF-6 does..

Ok Mario. I emailed you a sample setup sheet and a couple of iges files. I hope they will help you. Good luck!

We're using Sandvik ball nose endmills

Get fan cards for the PC. Route the heat from bottom to top. Avoid motherboards the place the cpu or memory right next to the power supply at the top of the case.

We use Qmodem here at our shop run from a 386 desktop mule for our 1985 Mori-Seki. Pure code streams from that thing. Real simple setup. Real cheap too. If you are sure where the tool is going, why would you need to see it 3 times? Want real time toolpath verification? look through the window of the machine. By the time you or the operator catches something, the damage is already done. For our newer Haas mills we run Cimco edit in dnc mode because we can run MC and send code at the same time.

I like Criterion. Tough, reliable and easy to teardown. Buy high quality bars and inserts.

James & CadCam: Thanks for the feedback. I downloaded the service pack and will attempt to install it at work tomorrow. I always suspected that arc/filtering had something to do with the feedrate problem. I'm not convinced that it's entirely within the post though. The orginal problem was first reconized with the MPHAAS post. I then tried MPFAN, MPFADAL and MPYASNAC and the same thing occured. The toolpath that caused the problem was surface/finish/scallop with spiral from center and a total filter tolerence of .001 checked. Highfeed was also used. These posts were untouched factory post right off the cd. I sometimes don't have time for troubleshooting because my superiors just want to see chips flying rather then a programmer (me) hacking the computer so I went with a surface/parallel toolpath at 45 deg and got the job done. With the way I program, if the machine isn't shaking the building they know something is wrong and then they get stressed. Sometimes it's hard getting the chiefs to understand. Once again thanks!

Mario; I'll send you something when I get back to work on monday. What I did was draw a bunch of nuts, bolts, and clamps that our guys use around the shop. I save these in a folder called "hardware" and merge them into the geometry. Carr-Lane has a cd filled with this stuff that you can import into your system. Translate/transform/mirror etc. as needed. For the machine table I looked at the specs in a Haas owner's manual. Did the same thing for our rotary table also. Looks good, works good, and helps the operators get the concept of what I doing with their machines.

I like to list what operation is being done, what tools are involved ie: tool mfg and part # and insert mfg and part #. I also list a very important item in our shop: max tool depth. I type this up in castillo text editor along with a few notes about when to check what and where etc. I also include a drawing of the project mounted on the machine table showing vise and clamp locations etc. It all depends. Sometimes our guys are overwhelmed by too much "data" such as found on a certain cad/cam system's setup sheet

I wish MC had tested V9 a little more throughly. I've never seen so many flaws. My boss doesn't believe me when I say "I didn't program it that way!" Beta testing works when you use it. Just downloaded the patches. Anybody get the uber fix yet? I think the first patch will fix lastnight's episode. (One half of a Z, X arc was sorta round from 180 to 270 and then from 270 to 360 decided it wanted to become more of a hexagon in three big facets). Various stabs into the part from weird linear moves that don't show up in true solid verify mode, virtually useless feed and speed calculations, tool numbers that don't really follow any kind of order at all, comments that fail to appear in the program, feedrates that were defined in the program header changing mid program to "F0." We have a network license and I was wondering if any of the "bugs" are more common or not with single user or network software? I still really like MC and we are gonna use it to craft our latest masterpiece: a 8500 lb moldbase.

What is the specific reason that you must cut your threads? Why not use form taps? [ 04-22-2002, 10:06 PM: Message edited by: herbert west ]