botty... which vari-axis did you get? We have a 630, and the post is ok, not great, but pretty close. Let me know if you have the same machine.

Great Idea, would love to find a library like that. Would be very helpful in backplot

great, You guys are the best, Thanks to all for the Replys. Looking forward to x Thanks Dave

I already do that, and it works well. The problem I am having is that a customer of ours would like to color code certain faces of a solid to depict which areas are functional without having to make a formal drawing or going thru a lengty phone conversation. He can do this in solidworks, but I am not able to bring it in to Mcam, and my boss is too cheap to buy me a seat of solidworks just for color coding. Thanks for the reply though Allen.

Is there any settings in Mcam to bring in the colors from solidworks? I guess solidworks can have different colors on different faces of a solid, but it looks like they get lost bringing them in to Mcam. If it is possible to retain the colors I would love to know how, and if it isn't could you Product development guys toss that in to X. Thanks alot Dave

I unfortunately installed the service pack this morning, right before I checked the message board. A very bone-headed move i admit, and so now I am getting a g56 work offset where there was a g54 in the same program this morning. I came very close to bouncing the head of our 5-axis off the part. Lucky for me I keep a change of shorts here for just such occasions. I am pretty sure that this is a bug. Please let me know if anyone else is seeing this problem, or anything similar. Thanks Dave

Anyone have any luck getting mastercam to output a consistant feed rate for a tap? For instance my control takes the pitch as the feed rate, a 1/4-20 tap would run at 250 rpm, but the feed needs to be .05 Any help would be wonderful, thanks in advance

I have and continue to use iscar shrink fit extensions. They have a ER32 on one end so they will go strait into a collect chuck. With a good quality collect chuck i get .0001 runout regularly. They are very inexpensive, less than 100$ and i skipped the heating unit and just use a map gas torch, no problems at all yet. just my .02

So for you guys that do use spaceballs what brand or model do you have, I would like to try one out. Thanks in advance

Im not positive, but I think it only works if you are outputting to a 4 or 5 axis machine.

Here's my .02, I've had good luck hard milling A2, depending on the rockwell. If its going to be in the low 50 rc range, I would suggest leaving .008 - .01 for finishing, and cut it dry. Get some air on the tool if possible, and use a cutter that is made for hard milling, Hanita and Niagra have some good tools, that do great in hard materials. good luck

March 75, I've noticed many good machinists are in the 75 club

Vericut is cool, but be prepared to drop 25-30k for it, and that doesnt include modeling the entire machine, toolholders, and things like that.

We have Ideas here, but they are going away for sure, I think they said it will take a year or so, but Ideas will be gone. It would seem to be a waste of training to learn Ideas when It will be replaced by UG. Just my .002

I have worked with T1 in the past and it is a lot friendlier to machine if you can have it sub-annealed first. It seems to mill ok after that, but you still will probably have to run any drills or reamers very slow, around 30 or so sfm, from what I remember. Hope that helps a little