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.

Are these direct drive?  If so DO NOT run unlocked.  When the DD can't handle the torque (roughing) it simply lets go completely.  Ask me how I know...  I took their advice and had it let go twice in two weeks and I changed back.  It was a huge mistake and scrapped an expensive indexable cutter in the process.  If you run high speed machining and put any load on the machine you are playing with fire if you run unlocked.

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.

Take a look at spreitzer as they have or had an indexing unit that may be what you are describing.  Other than that if you have checked the big boys (3r, erowa, hirschmann) then I don't know what to tell you.

I'm looking for an EDM work holder that swivels left to right and up and down, with the compounding angles being very accurate.

Can you be a little more specific as to "swivels" and define "very accurate"?  Are you looking for something you can move in the machine without breaking setup and has a vernier scale, or something to set on the bench using a roll or reverse angle to check it?  Are you in a wire or sinker?

Thanks Allan.  Turns out some people "had a bunch of things hosed up" at one of our main locations.  A new firewall was rolled out and some internal things fixed.  Today seems much better so I hope it sticks.

This started last week, about Thursday.  Anytime you invoke a command that (presumably) cause Mastercam to page out to the Net-Hasp there is lag, extreme lag.  The screen will haze out, or plain wait for "file open", or right click in the ops manager.

We have not had this problem, or it has been really rare and isolated and we have been on Net-Hasp (offsite) for months.  Now this issue going on for a week and getting worse is everybody, though only five are working today.

IT guy says he has been monitoring network traffic and it isn't showing overloaded.

Anybody experience this or have any guesses??

I expected them to snap off on contact, but they did the job quite well

Gee g I don't know why you just don't buy the unbreakable end mills ?!?!

We also use both daily, seems to be a good fit.

That's what happens when the wrong people are making decisions.  Assuming they can measure this thermal conductivity, it alone is not the only variable to consider in mold design.  If temperature control is king there are many other ways to get it, in spades.

That being said, in my experience you may be beating your head against the wall trying to get a really good milled finish in 3D work.  Ron's suggestions are good but IMHO you get a little increase in old TIN coating over uncoated but I wouldn't be going out of my way to use it exclusively.  Again as Ron said inserted tools for roughing if you can and again the coating on those inserts could be TIN and not anything real expensive.

One way a 5-Axis kicks the crap out of a Horizontal is tooling cost. If you have low volume, high mix, that gets REALLY expensive. Now, to be fair, high volume prismatic work that can be done in 2 ops, the HMC reigns supreme, hands down. I can tool up a 32 Pallet MAM72-35V for around with Raptors for around $25k, or for an additional $20k, go full blown Lang. How many pallets you going to properly tool with off the shelf toolingfor $42k? 3? 4? AND, how much unattended tiem will I get compared on those 4 pallets vs. the 32 on the 5-Axis? If I have some smaller high volume parts, I can always add a 4 sided chick tombstone and get a few parts on the same pallet. So the first qustion you have to ask is are you a high volume shop or are you a low volume shop?

Well we don't have any volume to speak of in the big picture machining world.  Our 4-axis a61's in pallet systems have cost a fortune in tooling.  We try to grab a 5-axis part in a Lang or 5th Axis vise with no prep, but sometimes we use a Techni-Grip.  Either way if we can oversize the material and tab it out in one op you can't beat it IMNSHO.  I really think it might be easier to train a programmer on 5-axis with today's software.  Giving a guy a "5-axis" part and telling him to build it on a 4-axis (which we did for a long time) is tough training.  Currently we are all rotary/rotary but we may mix that up down the road.

We've got a LOT of customers that just skipped the HMC all together and went straight from VMC's to 5-Axis.

I have been thinking the same thing, for many reasons.  Before I run this up the ladder to my boss, what are the top 3 or 4 reasons your customer give for going to the 5-axis and skipping the HMC?

Using Tornos and Swiss in the same sentence may be misleading.  There may be new controls that can handle it differently but my experience involved Tornos machines that had a totally different program structure where everything is time based.  Pretty sweet machines but they could not be programmed anything like a Swiss/Citizen style machine.

Have you been in front of the machine?  Do you have any existing programs to look at?