Ron is spot on about Thin-Bit. If they don't have it they can usually turn specials pretty fast. Full disclosure I have a family member who programs and runs for them. For a small fee I can see if I can pull strings if you want

I'm with Ron, I need to know the material. I was waiting to hear what it was mostly because I had a possible design concern. Going from over 1/2" down to .034 on that corner with the hole thru it, I hope material choice was given some thought. With the heat/cool cycles of exhaust you wouldn't want to have failure issues.

I can speak positively for Amada and Marvel, however most of the work has not been high production. After 10 years the Marvel was having some parallelism issues but I think there was a period of low/no maintenance so not sure if you can blame the saw.

Your friend needs a different end mill vendor. If you look at a 3-flute ball there is one flute that goes past center. A 4-flute ball has two relieved and two meeting at center like a two flute. That being said if you MUST spend a lot of cut time using the tip, as murlin said you will probably have more success with a two flute. And yes basically you have zero SFM at the tip of a ball end mill so depending on material and rough or finish cut you may need to make adjustments to what you would otherwise do. HTH

I feel your pain on the lack of absolute documentation but as Ron said I have never seen it either. The only industry I have worked in that lives by SO MUCH standard aircraft procedure that isn't documented and survives on tribal knowledge. At least that has been my experience. What I don't get is how your QA folks are being difficult, which is the way I am reading it. The customer spec is the customer spec and you order the material based on what they tell you and inspect it the same way. Period and of story. Your PO must specify how you want it, even if you have a case where the customer part is not "grain direction controlled". Then again I don't know who is writing the PO but it shouldn't be an issue for them to be on the same team and list it ST / LT / L in addition to specifying which is which in writing.

Is there a reason you aren't using the MCX interface for Vericut? This would negate the fear of pulling a MCX report and not trusting that is matches Vericut?

The last time that happened to one of my guys I had to do a "hard" uninstall and reinstall. Also I think he had to recreate GUI customization as the old files were holding something corrupt. If you search here it was discussed not too long ago I think.

Being an old timer EDM guy I would think burn as well. However.....................what if you changed your other operations and left material on the opposite sides of where you want these to finish, then you would have some symmetry to work with and you could maybe wobble broach? If not the wobble then at least you would have more stability I think and could get it done quicker. Then you go back and remove what is already gone in the pics you posted. Just a thought since you are trying to avoid burning.

Pay me now or pay me later............................. I am certainly no expert on additive machining but if the material is going to be very close to 6Al-4V I wouldn't replicate steel speeds and feeds, not axial or radial cut depths. That being said the advice above seems sound to me.

I don't even think it takes a half second, it isn't really a time thing. It was more of a PITA just getting the post dialed in for all the possible combinations. Unless we are missing something in the parameters the machine will not throw an alarm when the B is locked and you invoke a B rotation. So if you have it locked and it comes to a B command it just sits there not moving and doesn't tell the operator anything.

We still run the a61's (Makino's with the lock/unlock unless the path is full 4, but the a51's and a82 are running unlocked all the time. Those machines run only aluminum so while you can still pull some horses it would be more concerning if we were running something tougher. The a51's and a82 are 5-axis with a Koma rotary. So when you switched to running locked on roughing, did you set this up in Misc Integers or hand edit? We have changed the posts for the conditions we want, which in the case of the a61's is all the time except full 4 motion.

Zoober I notice you are using the default "H1" for all tool heights, but not the D2, is there a reason for that? We have always run "H1 D2" spit at all tlchg with the G43 and it was a big help when moving into pallet systems. With DF1 only having the one machine for now I don't know if it will matter to him, but thought I would mention. Another thing; for all of our 4-axis we had (still are) spitting out the M10/M11 all the time except full four movement. Going to 5-axis we picked up a post from a sister company and they were running unlocked all the time. When we talked to Makino about it they swear there is more torque when running unlocked and they recommend just running unlocked all the time. Anyone have input one way or the other on that? All the 5-axis are rotary/rotary.

If you check "make main level always visible" and have your note level set as main level when you save the file, it should be there when opened.

Nice tip Ron, though I am wondering if there is a way to force the Verisurf note to stay open. I tried looking through help, and got none. We, as mentioned above have always used the drafting note inside MCX. Standard protocol is level 10000 labeled "Program Notes" and if a new note is added the grammer orients the note front and center and saves the file so "you can't miss it" when you open the file. Thought I would ask if anyone knew a way to keep the Verisurf note open and out front?

Thanks Karl! Although Ron started this I was having exactly the same search issues last week. You all may think it is crazy, but I was the most productive ever using two complete different systems, now I have two guys trying it. Thus the issue and need for the KVM. Still in test mode but I think it will be a boost for them.