I put a file on the FTP. In the lathe folder, it's called "Cam Follower". Feel free to look if you want. quote: Are you talking about a rough or a finish toolpath? The part where I'm having a problem is on the roughing pass. There is a .25" hole through the center, and a .75" dia x .65 dp bore. I use a 1/2" endmill to drill to .648" dp, and then just chain the bore geometry. The finish pass works fine. quote: Do you have "Extend Countour to Stock" checked? No. quote: You have the option now to tell it where to start the bore from. That point is the end of the contour in the X dimension so if you have a .5" boring bar and you drill to say .562" you should chain a line in -Z as deep as your bore then in -X down to .562". The bore will start at .562 + the depth of cut. This is probably what I'll do. Thanks for the advice.

Greetings all, One thing that upsets me the most in lathe is boring operations. There seems to be no end to the combination of lead in/out, overlap, shorten end of contour, depth of cut, etc. to prevent the damn thing from crashing. I wish we had a feature to tell the boring tool to start on a given diameter. For instance, in the part I'm making now, I'm "drilling" a hole with an endmill. At first I was leaving .005 on the bottom face. The boring op still saw that as stock to be cut...even though stock to leave in Z was .01". Adjust the endmill so that it leaves only .002" on the bottom face...same thing. Here's the deal. I know the boring bar is smaller than the hole by .100. I KNOW that this operation can work. Why must Mastercam lathe make me ? Why do I have to mess around with Adjust stock to make this work? [/rant]

quote: that is why i use backup I do now.

Greetings, I just stumbled across the problem of Autosave not working the hard way. Mastercam crashed. I thought "Oh no problem...I've got autosave going...". Nope. I was wrong. It hasn't saved anything. I've verified that all the settings are correct, and Autosave is activated. I guess I haven't noticed until now that it wasn't active. Could this be a compatibility thing as X3 isn't supported for Windows 7? I'd love any ideas on how to get this going again.

Got it Matt. Once I found the little button to copy a set of standards, I was set. Thanks for the help all!

I found a Microsoft Access database with all the pertinent info. You can open the generic file which lists all the databases for a given set of fasteners and standards (for example, ANSI inch or ANSI metric). Once you open that there are like 30 different databases where you can change the info. The best part of it is that the titles of the databases are written in some cryptic shorthand, so you have to open each one to figure out if you're close or not. Even then there is no guarantee that you're in the right one.

Dave, I did "Show custom sizing" but there is nowhere on there to change the pitch of the tap.

Greetings all, I thought that there was a way in Solidworks to create and edit hole wizard holes to have custom sizes and to be able to add commonly used odd sizes that the standard database didn't have. I'm using Solidworks 2009 and I'm in the toolbox configuration, in the hole wizard hole area, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to either edit the info that is there, or make a new entry. I want to add a hole wizard hole for 5/8-27 threads that we commonly use. Any help would be appreciated.

Jim!! I was just getting ready to copy that EXACT text from one of your previous posts into my next post. It works great now. The method I used was to take the circumference of the rolled diameter, and divide it by the number of rotations (in my case, 2) and put that in the Y spacing box. I suppose that if you only had 1 rotation, you could also simply do a "Between points" and fill in the correct Y value.

Ok. That's another one of the weird things, Ron. No matter what you change the values to in the transform box, the toolpath still comes out at 90, and 270. I started at 0 with a 180 step, and it still output at 90 and 270...with the same coordinates. quote: Well it looks like you are telling it to rotate 90 degrees then rotate 180 on top of that. Would that not put it back where it started? I wouldn't think so. Wouldn't it put the toolpath on the opposite side? I don't even care if it rotates at the beginning. I don't need it at 90. I was just playing around with the parameters.

It's still not giving me what I want. I guess what I envision is a given set of coordinates for one side, and then those "A" coordinates + 180 deg. for the opposite side. I'm feeling right now.

All the toolplanes and WCS are OK. They're set to TOP.

Greetings all, In the FTP site, in the X3 files is a Z2G called "Gas Exchange Module2". In the 2nd machine group is some geometry that got unrolled. We used axis substitution and created some contour paths. They came out great. We did a transform op to rotate the toolpaths 180 degrees, and it appears to look OK. The verify and backplot all look great, but the code is not. We're not getting the rotation to 180 degrees. The toolpath is simply repeating the path on the same side. I've messed with the toolpaths as much as I can, and I can't get it sorted. Any ideas? It's for a Haas VF3. Thanks in advance.

Here's one that bugs me. Say you want to do any lathe toolpath. After doing the chaining or whatever, the parameter box comes up. There is a value for Max Spindle Speed. Now pick a drill or something that uses a direct RPM. Input a value for the spindle speed higher than the max. You get an error. The frustrating part is that you don't even get a chance to correct it before you have to start clicking through error messages. BTW, has anyone had the joy of disabling that message then getting because every time you try to type in a speed faster than the max, it just defaults back to the max? Perhaps it's just me. I get in a hurry when adding a toolpath or editing a toolpath, and then spend a minute or two swearing and wondering what's going on.

I would think that you would want to start in the threading parameters and select the "Multi Start" box. I believe filling out the pertinent info there should start you on the right path.

Linky This is the topic I referenced.

I had a post awhile back about using stock advance. I think JParis chimed in and said that he uses a custom drill cycle to pull bar with. It is a little bit of post editing, but it's well worth it. I've tried messing with the stock advance toolpath, and just haven't got it figured out.

Yes, I know this. Mastercam and I have done that dance quite a few times.

This makes me laugh. I just got done writing that post, and decided to take the plunge and see what mastercam did for recalculating feeds and speeds. It did nothing. Nothing was changed. So why the hassle? Figure it out, CNC.

Why does lathe have to be such a pain?!? Why does the program need to recalculate speeds and feeds when I do something like switch coolant back on (because Mastercam shut it off for some reason before...) or renumber the tools. My personal favorite is when I copied a group of operations using ONE (1) tool to a new machine group and Mastercam decided that it wanted to make a NEW tool for each of the five operations. They were the exact same tool, just five of them with a different number. Why does it have to be this hard, CNC Software? Why can't lathe have the same simple functionality as mill? Why can't the simple, easy stuff be fixed?

I believe you would want to look for the ptap_2$ block to change the feed for subsequent holes. I just looked in my post and saw that the ptap_2$ block ends up referencing the pdrill_2$ block. Thus...if you want to change the feed for the subsequent holes in the tapping cycle, you'd have to change it in the pdrill_2$ block. I suppose you'd have to use a result statement or if/then statement to isolate the feed output for just the tapping cycle. HTH.

Happens to me as well.

quote: Are you sure you don't have some MC created "New View #X" Quite certain. Oh well. Like I said previously, I found that changing EVERY operations work offset to -1 fixed this problem. Thanks for the help.

That's the weird thing, Dave. I've checked the offsets associated with the views, and they are all set to -1. But when I make an op with the view, it comes up as 1.

OK...I think we're getting ahead of ourselves here. This happens before I even post. When I create a new operation in lathe or mill, it says "Work offset #1" in the operation manager. It's been doing this since I changed the work offset for a previous machine group. The problem's solved now...I just changed ALL the ops work offsets back to -1. Thanks.