Having a maintenance program for continual updates and bug fixes is fine. Most software companies do this. However each customer will have to decide if the amount of updates and bug fixes is worth the cost, or if they want to switch to a different product. That seems to be the choices, as I see it. Just because there is a list of things that have been fixed or added or upgraded since maintenance came out doesn't mean its "enough" to justify the cost, or answer the questions about things that were asked to be changed/fixed years ago that still aren't. Each customer has to decide if they think CNC is putting out bang for the buck in their maintenance releases.

David- Thanks SOOOOO much! Worked like a charm! I had begun looking thru the reg as Mark indicated, but this was the fast way. Thanks again! Gotta love this forum!

NOt positive this is an MC issue, but don't know what else it would be. When I try to install SE on my box, it says there is SE older version there(which there isn't) and I must uninstall that before installing new. I dumped the sedge.dll and the sedgedata folder from the "common" files folder. Any ideas?

ToolMan's comment is pretty much standard for a lot of assembled aluminum/steel parts. Aside from that, I would check with: http://www.microsurfacecorp.com/ Because if I understand correctly, your shaft is used on many parts?????

Thanks Tony I might take you up on that. I will have to get a series of pics. How would you want them, jpeg, bmp,other?

Oh, and no solidworks or pro-e, but we have solid edge. Problem is it won't do as much as we need, only part of it.

Thanks Bernie I will go that route, but I thought maybe someone here had done some before. Maybe I should send Dave Thompson an email since he seems to know a lot about animation.

I need to show the movement in an assembly of plastic parts with a metal insert also. The plastic parts have snaps and wings that flex over other parts. I would like to show spring action also, or rebound if you will. Does anyone know of software to help with this? Of course free ware would be great, but if its not outrageous I am ok with paying for it. Since this is not my thing, so to speak (dog and pony shows) I would entertain paying someone else to do it, but it would require a confidentiality agreement, so not real practical. This is not something we see as a frequent need in the future, so I am looking for some "one time help".

Ok its not set read only, but it is defaulting to a bunch of version 8 crap?????????????

Did you have the file set as read only or something?

I would like to hear experience on this too, or the MITS AJX also. Have some 304 jobs coming up and looking at new tooling.

"shortly" is relative, I imagine.

I always do it by editing prg after posting. Use a subroutine or macro. If you want to go back and forth, chain "partial" and click "wait", then add the depth incremental at each end. One of these guys might know how to make a post do it, but that is how I do it.

I would also say that Jack's 8620 suggestion is good, if you want to case harden. Its hard to beat. But small parts may be a litle difficult to keep the movement down.

Bruce, I am with the P-20 suggestion, as its stability is good, and it nitrides well. We have done this several ways. Our favorite is using XADC coating from Armaloy, but we have also used several different nitriding operations, the most popular being one called "Dyna-Blue". If you can't find anything on it, I will look it up for you. Don't have it available at the moment. My .02 Nothing wrong with 4140, but it would need to be pre-hard for best results, and I think the P-20 would be better. Actually the best P-20 we have found for machinability is the Japanese PX-5. It really does machine easier, and although we haven't done a lot of nitriding with it, the ones we have done came out well.

Good one!!! Nice point!!! (the Chinese training thing)

vamvany, if I understand your question correctly, the answer is no. Not until "X" anyway. If you are talking about moving toolbars like in autocad, work NC, and other programs that are fully windows compliant.

So on this subject, anyone do plastic injection mold design with soldworks? We occaisonally have to outsource some mold design, and we tried a guy with solidworks who said he could not do the job we asked, and another with solidworks said if it would do it, he didn't know how. I know some will depend on the person, but in mold design if you aren't going to redraw the part (which the one SW guy said he couldn't do) then you will have to deal with some surfacing, and it seemed as if this was where SW fell down. Our favorite outside guy uses UG, but again it may be him as the reason we get good models and he never says he can't do something. In house its been MC, MDT, and now SE in some blended fashion to get what ever we need.

The highest jump I have seen in carbide is 9% and average is 6%. So far the salesmen are saying no more increase coming now. Hope not, but doesn't make sense that you guys are hearing 20-40%??? Either I was GETTING shafted, or you are ABOUT to.

Did you consider the Point Cloud chook that was passed out for free (till Sept. I think) a while back. Search point cloud and it should come up. It works pretty good, but I only used it once so far, so that isn't much of a track record.

You might try renaming the "mill9.cfg" file and then try to open MC to see if its in your config. No matter if there is one file in the temp folder, I would dump it.

Forgive me Gail, I just don't live in a production world, or atleast not yet, so I don't spend much time on repeat processes. Since we build molds (for the time being) most things are 1 to 12 quantities, smaller molds. We are looking in to doing more production type work, as the mold building margins "ain't what they used to be". I am assuming you are checking production run parts, and everything you and Tom are talking about makes logical sense, I was just curious and wanted to learn a little.

Curiosity is killing me, so I gotta ask. What size are these holes, in what BC and what is the tolerance?

+1 to Gail Recreating the geo is best, but you might take a shot at filter settings to make the chordal deviation smaller, say .0002 or so, and see what difference you get.

Its been a while since I used one, but seems like there was a "continuous mill" option somewhere in the Prototrak.