I would really like to find a copy of the toollibmaker.zip if possible as well. I have done some searching and also cannot find the ftp anymore. Any help would be greatly appreciated. And PS I am not sure what #Rekd is referring to and neither does my reseller.

After the years of using mastercam and the frustrations coupled with it I guess I am still willing to entertain the idea that there is a decent amount of automation possible. I truly don't expect full automation at best I want to find how much I can achieve. I don't feel I addressed the level of experience you guys have only the exact comments made. It was quite an assault for me daring to insinuate there was a solution other then the same old way. Maybe review what was said by me and to me, I started with a request for advice and receive a hail of emotional statements in return. I am starting to learn my lesson and probably should ask my unorthodox questions elsewhere...

You guys are pretty defensive about this subject I can tell. To be fair to myself I must say you morphed my valid point into an invalid one by adding a lot of extra things I haven't said. All I have described is milling of aluminum parts so far. And I never said anything about it taking two minutes or live tooling lathes or one size fits all solutions. I just want to cut programming time down whenever I can specifically in traditional milling and wanted some feedback on the fastest ways people were using to make finish passes. The surface rough pocket set to facing mode and with roughing turned off would achieve that amazingly well and work in most cases if A. It had depth limit controls (turning on facing removes the ability to limit depth ranges). B. it has the ability to not finish the outer boundary of the flat areas like the 2d pocket. You may want to give this a try and see how well it handles everything outside of those flaws. And seeing that it shows the potential to automate finish passes on walls. I apologize for my own defensiveness but I immediately came under assault by a number of you for daring to wonder these things and in a fairly insulting fashion without you guys knowing my history with machine work.

Glenn (post guru) just mentioned that visual basic is only supported by an offline compiler, that's unfortunate. I have a very good working set of ops for aluminum parts that is very near automated, coupled with my picture frame tabbing method which requires no hand work (dropping the block on the table will even release the part) outside of lightly deburring an edge I can produce a broad range of parts with very fast programming and since the part is just a block throughout the whole process regardless of it's shape fixturing is virtually non existent. Seeing this I do believe that in many cases programming can be made very systematic and these methods are starting to be used heavily in industry for short runs. I believe if you break down a machined part in the right way it is usually mostly a series of the same redundant tasks and I am trying to get away from looking at every part as a completely new task I've never done before. I've been doing this for almost 20 years now after all...

thank you for taking my request serious (I have been very interested in using visual basic with mastercam as I use it frequently with excel). I only got upset at comments to the effect of "be a programmer" my heart is in this without question. I always insist on top quality results and I believe I can get the same results I would get the long route but with less time. Using the toolpath I mentioned I have already cut the time down significantly on complex models. This technology is getting better (program automation) and we need to stay competitive (it's shocking to new hire machinists when you show what first cutting is turning around in one day). I want to use a program like mastercam to solve these problems as I can have some hybrid of the two, both expediting programming of common redundant tasks, and the ability to bring the full complexity to bear in cases where it doesn't produce the result I will accept.

We also use them a lot, I know the bulk of their entire process and have seen over a hundred resulting parts. They can turn many parts around complete and with extremely fast turn around. in the rapid turn prototype industry I work speed can be everything. You guys may enjoy taking longer to achieve the same result (we are talking about simple finish contours here) but I am trying to automate redundant operations, why not? Is there any reason not to want that?

good advice, fall behind and let companies like first cut remove all your business

Does anyone have any good ideas for quickly making finish passes (for vertical walls) on a solid model other than just picking edges or edge curves? Also that has lead in and out and tool compensation (G41/G42). Surface rough pocket set to facing with rough turned off is almost perfect, but also almost unusable, as it has no means of controlling the depth so you better pick a tool that reaches the entire distance. Or you can make a planar surface to block it at a certain depth in which case it will finish that surface as well (no checked surfaces), and the subsequent tool with more reach cannot be made to start further down. Also it insists on finishing the outer boundaries of all the flat surface even those with no walls (like the tops of bosses). So for me without overcoming these issues the only way to use it is to convert the toolpath to CAD geo and just apply a 2d contour using incremental 0 depth where you avoid the wasted cuts on outer edges of bosses that have no wall and control the depths for each tool.

As far as I can see turning the filter on without arcs selected (or leaving it off) still yields arc output (may still be missing something). The post edit you mentioned seems reasonable but I would only do that after I conclude I can't do this another way. And I do want to only apply this in certain cases so I'd rather not handle it in the control def. Do you know of a way using the filter / tolerances? Thanks for your help

Does anyone know a way to convert arcs to lines using toolpath parameters like filtering etc. I know I can actually break the arcs using break many but I'd rather be able to do it from the toolpath (or some other way?). I also should mention the "present arcs as lines" setting in smoothing doesn't appear to do it. And a somewhat related question (at least in my case) does anybody have good advice for cases with surface finish toolpaths where the tool moves up and down in z very slightly (0.0002 or so ) and you want to round that off to no z motion? Thanks in advance...

shux! I may eventually have to move to 2018, it's still in beta I believe. I use x9 and 2017 currently. I really appreciate all the work you have done providing this as a free add on. No chance that will be added to earlier versions huh?

Thanks for your response. I guess what prompted this thought was I copied a tool list with screen shot into word. I then made a screen shot of my own using the x+ screenshot tool and replaced that had been output by the tool list (mine is set to 800px for tool lists as it is) and it was much clearer / sharper. I had to "scale" the image in word to make it the same size due to it being a different resolution as you said. Sooo... I guess the question is can you have the higher resolution but yet smaller size like in word?

This question has been asked by someone else in another thread but hasn't received an answer yet. Is there a way to improve the resolution of the screen shot? I noticed when you use the x+ screenshot tool you can get a much clearer image then the one made for the tool list or setup.

Is there any easy way to add additional pictures to the tool list (or setup sheet)?

That works great (for sorting by tool number) thanks for your help!