Try calling these guys: oemair.com We buy oil and filters for our Ingersoll screw compressors from them.

Lots of different ways to do it. A lot of people just put the machine center of rotation as the only offset for the entire program. Your part just has to be placed accurately in the machine, and away you go. There's a nice thread in the post forum about having MC calculate and output your G10s based on the Tplane angles and origins, which is something I plan to implement, but haven't got around to it. Other people have pretty nifty macros for rotating the coordinate system. I've seen some that recalculate G54 at every B rotation, which I don't like - and I've seen others that take G54 and populate the other offsets based on the angles and desired work offset number you input during the macro call.....which is pretty awesome. What I've been doing lately because I'm lazy, is just placing a block of G10 calls that set all of the offsets I'm going to use at the center of rotation, on the top of the pallet. Then I have a block of incremental G10s that shift each of those to the actual origin that's desired. This just happens to be the exact same XYZ numbers that come up when you use "Analyze>Distance", and select the center of your pallet - and the origin of your part while in that particular tool plane. Not exactly automated, but it's better than finding stuff at the machine.

It's 25 thousand mm/min, or 984 inches per minute. Them fancy metric folks like to use decimal places instead of commas.

If you want to get fancy: Flip your WCS upside down - use whatever toolpath gives you the nicest, smoothest motion with a .1875 ball mill (same thing you did yesterday?) - then backplot and save the toolpath as geometry. Go back to your normal WCS, 3D contour your backplotted/saved geometry, and viola. (You'll have to pay attention to the shank of the lollipop though).

It will work when there are branch points. Just click the "Only" button on the ribbon bar, and tick the "Plane Mask in chaining" radio button towards the bottom. (But once you do that, it won't work for 3D chains)

Crazy. Not sure what the finish looks like with a .012 chip load on a .118 diameter ball mill, but it sure is fun to watch!

How are the pockets numbered? Are they numbered 1-60 or 0-59? I don't think it would be a problem to fill them all up, but you need to watch the ATC ready position logic and see if there's something about your ATC design that requires the empty pot. I haven't seen how a 60 tool NH5000 magazine works, so I can't help you there. Just pretend you put a tool in T0, and then cycle the tool changer and see if there are any impending disasters that would come along with it.

Yikes. Didn't expect that.

Mic, did you try changing the gap settings to "follow surface", and the "keep tool down" set to a large number? That should fix up the path you've got in the original screen capture.

I don't have one, but one thing you could do is get a cheapo side lock holder, and put a piece horseshoe shaped pipe in it instead of an endmill, and angle it to blast right into your air block. When it's time to run the air spindle, just ATC the pipe cleaner first, run your coolant-thru to flush any crap away, and then ATC to the air spindle. We use a similar setup to clean nooks and crannies before the Kaiser fan comes in to dry stuff off.

Craig, is there any feedback to let the machine know that the indexing has been completed?

I don't think you'll have any issues with the machine quality (unless you buy the same one Mark bought ), but your operators might complain about the differences in program format. Using G56 for tool length offsets, then using "H" for work offsets? Clark Machinery keeps spamming this nice 10 pallet MB: http://inv.clarkmachinerysales.com/q/webinv/019548=p,4616,0M0130,,list,,,20244069

I'm with the "flip it" crowd, for all the same reasons listed above. That said - it also all depends on your money situation. You don't HAVE to spend a zillion dollars getting it set up perfectly right away, and you don't HAVE to rush out and buy a big CMM to inspect parts you don't even have yet. If you're comfortable to the point where selling or keeping this machine isn't necessarily going to change your lifestyle - it could be worth keeping and putting together, just for fun and a learning experience. It could very well bring in work to other parts of your shop completely unrelated, simply because people are impressed that you have this giant, expensive machine. Not to mention, you'll have much better luck selling it if it's all together and running. Whatever you choose to do - definitely go into it with zero expectation of finding large 5 axis work for it. Edit: *If the machine is a Cincinatti - sell it to any sucker who'll buy it, and forget everything else I said. LOL

I think a critical thing here is when he said "machined on all 6 sides"..... did he mean machined on front and back, and contoured around the outside? Or machined on all 6 sides - like, actual features on all 6 sides. If the former - a nice VMC with a 10 pallet Erowa Robot Easy system would be perfect. If the latter - he needs an HMC at the minimum. He did mention all the drilling was from the same side, so I'm guessing it's a 2 operation VMC part.

I think a Chook could be made that would do a great job of transforming and rotating toolpaths for a tombstone automagically. It wouldn't be as pretty and feature rich as the Gibbs add-on (I'm assuming that's what Ron was talking about creating), but it would definitely be pretty valuable. I'm pretty sure all the stuff is available inside Mastercam to make it happen for somebody who knows how to do it.

I found this quote from that story amusing: LOL. On what planet has Mori "finally merged in both name and practice" with Hitachi? I assume he really means "We finally got people to stop calling us looking for Hitachi parts". Mori only sold the old Hitachi based machines for like a year or so, to get rid of all the WIP - and they were all promptly killed off after that.

I'm pretty sure the Duravertical 5100 is still a half Japanese half Davis CA machine (They ship kits from Japan, and slap them together in Davis). The "eco" machines were the China junk from DMG.

Yeah I can't tell if that was the gearbox exploding at :54 seconds, or just the sound it makes when you disengage the feed in a .078ipr cut.

Not sure. I'm not a lathe guy so I don't know if lathe guys typically use the little Ap symbol as diameter removed or depth of cut? From the scale of it, I didn't think it looked like 1.3 inch DOC, but once I saw that the chips were .078 thick, I realized my perspective of that scale is AFU.

1.33 depth of cut and .078ipr feed.

LOL Just kidding. I have a friend with a DMU50 and they seem to like it. As far as the 18K tooling, it's hit and miss, because it really needs to be balanced with the pull stud and the tool for speeds that high. We buy almost all Techniks stuff and it's "balanced to 24,000rpm at G2.5", but you can still tell a difference between tools at 18,000rpm (we don't have a balancer).

It just depends on how far off center your feature is going to be.

What kind of other machines do you have in the shop right now? What model Fanuc controls are on them? If they're not finished setting up the machine yet - you can save some money by getting those options right away. Otherwise you'll have to pay for somebody to come put in MAZACC3D. When you go in on Monday morning, you can look at the options on the control by hitting the left arrow soft key once or twice until you see the DIAGNOS button, then hit: DIAGNOS>VERSION>OPTION. Options in black are the ones you have, options in white are the ones you don't have. "Shape Comp" is G61.1, "High Speed" is G05P2

^ This. Gotta have Y axis as well:

Trevor, it all depends on how the parameters are set as far as whether or not you use the Tool Data or Tool Offset page, as well as the H calls for the tools. I had all Fanuc controls before switching to Mazak, so mine are all set up to use G43H just like any Fanuc machine. You can take your program right out of one of your existing machines, put it in the Mazak, and the only thing you'd need to change is the high speed commands, maybe some coolant thru M codes, and rigid tap M codes. (I have the parameters on all mine set to rigid tap automatically on G84, so there is no M code at all). I use the Tool Data page for the tool length only. The wear comp for the length and diameter come from the Tool Offset page. This is handy, because if you have the wrong H number on your G43 line, the machine will still use the tool length of the tool that's actually in the spindle, and will use the wear comp of the incorrect H number. So worst case scenario, your length is only off a few thou. You're probably not going to be happy making molds if all you have is G61.1. That's MAZACC2D - for lines and arcs. It doesn't like splines. You should have them come out and upgrade you to MAZACC3D at the minimum. I think it costs $3500. It's actual additional hardware that gets installed in the control. Since you're primarily making molds though, you might want to get "fine spline interpolation" and "high smoothing control" too. That's another $5K on top of MAZACC3D, but you'll be fully decked out at that point. I believe the latest version of MP Master will work right out of the gate for your machine with no changes. You just use the misc integer for the high speed calls. I had Jeremy at DBS Solutions edit mine to get the G05P2 calls working correctly, but I think some of the guys here from the board got it going right in the latest version. G61.1 never has to be cancelled, so you can just put G61.1 wherever you want, and it'll stay active until you hit reset or M30. G05P2 is a PITA to add manually though. It will alarm on any comments or spindle speed changes, so it has to be cancelled (G05P0) and then re-called at the end of every toolpath - so it's important to have the post spit it out correctly.