They look really good using the manual method, and it does what I need it to. I'll give it a try. Thanks.

I have a graphite part that has 3.5 dia. x .002 dp concave and the radial toolpath has worked the best. Being that it is graphite the tool wears a lot, so when the tool gets back around to where it started there is mismatch. Is there a way to work from both edges and machine the concave with the tool mating up on the same spot 180 from where it started? See sketch.

I also use ProE/Creo and sometimes parts with many features and large assemblies do cause some slow downs. It looks like the motherboard is at a max of 1333MHz and that is what I have for RAM speed also (Good point though). I would like to note the odd choice of "sticks" that it came with. There is one 2gig and two 1gig, so from what I recall that different motherboards can be limited to certain combinations of RAM. That being the case and from what I am hearing I think one 8GB stick would be a good choice for now. Thank you for the help.

I have a Dell T5500 and I don't think that it has enought RAM. It is at 4GB right now, but I could have up to 48GB. Where is the cut off point at which it is just a waste of money, and What kind of processing time improvement should I expect to see if upgraded to let's say 12GB. It seems most people here stop at about 12GB.

We should be there now, but as Goetzlnd said "roundness to .0001 according to our CMM......"

We have a new V56I Makino and we are working out the bugs. When trying to cut a 6" pocket it was .0005"/.0006" out of round, but the other dimensions were fine. The part must be accurate within .0001". This was with breaking the circle geometry into 20,000 straight segments. Line segments is what was recommended by our reseller. Prior to that we tried I's and J's with poor results. With all the options available it is hard to have a place to start. MotorCityMinion maybe you have found some answers since posting about your S56, or does anyone else have suggestions?

I think I see what you are saying. We moved the origin so that the z was off the very upmost portion of the part, but the x and y were moved too. Still looking into it.

We are having trouble drilling some holes at an angle via the a axis tilted up. It is a 30" dia x 1.5" thick. The holes are 1\2" dia at 60 deg like so--> // angle if the part was lying down flat. Using "4th axis tard needs help" post every thing looks good except when it posts out it is not quite correct. Some of the holes are not drilling where they are supposed to. What would cause the post not to work correctly, but backplot to be ok? Could it be something other than the post before I go poking around in there. Thanks ahead of time.

ThreadTech seems prety solid and calculates quite a bit of kinds of threads. The TDWIN looks more user friendly, but less powerfull. I will have to check them out again. Thanks for the responses.

Edit: Sorry I did not know the "person without a father" word when referring to threads was bad. We get quite a few prints with large (sometimes 8" and bigger)"xxxx"(odd pitches also) threads. I have the ANSI B1.1 that helps me calculate the needed dimensions, but I would like a program to check with. I have tried ThreadTech and ThreadPal. I prefer ThreadPal, but it is the demo version and I want to see what my options are. I did not find much more than this with a google search. Does anyone else use a program to calculate threads like this. If so, what does everyone prefer. Thanks.

Is the part graphite or for the silicon industry? Can you give more of the note/callout or whatever it is? I work with some French people I may be able to help.

My co-worker has a setup sheet look like the attached file. My setup sheet is just fine. Same exact .rpx file. We can not get his to go back to original size. If we do get it to print it does one page and drops the rest. Has anyone seen this? Thanks.

When I bring in step files from ProE I have a similar problem. I can not change the color of the model. Not a real show stopper for me, but a similar problem nonetheless.

It is good to hear I'm not crazy.

"In your transform op you are selecting a toolpath that has already been set to have the posting turned off? " - Yes One toolpath normal One toolpath ghosted Both transformed - ghosted one still posts

I have two lines drawn just for testing. One line gets a contour toolpath. The second line gets a contour toolpath, but it gets ghosted. Now I transform both of them together. The one that was ghosted now posts out. Is this normal? I did not think that would happen.

Good to hear. Thanks. This is also a change over to Windows 7.

When I hit the save icon I can move to the file pulldown menu before the icon is depressed. The pulldown menu then covers up the save icon. I moved the save icon to the other side of the screen. I have not had problems lately, but we have a new machine the same as mine and it is doing the same thing except he can not hit the save icon and then open the file pulldown right away until it is done saving. The new machine has overwritten a couple files already today. I contacted our reseller and them seem boggled by it too. hmmm... Any ideas as to what is causing this? Are we doing something wrong besides what has been already discussed? Representatives of CNC Software have you seen anything like this?

I don't have anything in my temp folder. Is this normal? This one?:C:\Program Files\mcamx5\common\temp

I have the NVIDIA Quadro 5000 and I don't know if it is the card or not, but when I rotate a large part with many many holes my MC/my computer locks up. I hit the end key and it locked up pretty good. The same part was tried using X5 on another older computer that did not lock up, and if fact spun faster. I have windows 7 32 bit, Intel Xeon 4 quad core 2.13 gz, X5, 4 gig ram, and the Quadro5000. The other computer was Windows XP 64 bit, AMD 2.39gz dual processors, 4 gig ram, and Quadro FX 3450. Any Ideas as to what makes the new one lock up and perform worse than the old?

Thanks. I was really hoping for it.

If I am using Excel or other software and another person has the document open and I want to open it Excel notifies me that the file is in use. Can Mastercam do something like this?

Ok so I found out what was happening. I worked on a large file and before I opened another I would hit the little disk icon to save. On these large files it took maybe 5 sec to save and it did not indicate the whole 5 sec it was saving. I then opened another file faster than it could finish saving. This caused the file being opened to be saved as the file being saved. I could repeat the error and I have had no problems in two days.

I had the same problem. Rich Thomas's solution worked for me. NVIDIA Quadro 5000 Wait.... toolbars went missing... I'll keep that for another topic.

I am using the Mastercam backup, but I turned my autosave function off. It just did it again. Time to call my reseller for some technical assistance, because I can't keep doing this. Thank you everyone.