We purchased two of our three routers used, with good results. The used ones are Komos, very heavy duty and high quality, and have been very good machines for us. We recieved training from Komo, and were very well satisfied with that as well. Our other machine is a CR Onsrud which we purchased new. It has also worked very well. Comparing the two yields some tradeoffs, the Komos are somewhat more robust, but also more expensive. While Komo parts and service are available, Onsrud has been much more responsive. For the parts you are running both machines are very adequate. You probably want a single head, single table machine. Since you already have vmcs you might want to consider the brand of controller. Most Komos will have a Fanuc but not quite all. I wouldn't think you need anything special as far as spindles go. Hope this helps. Tim

I would try using two ops

1 You must have a CNC control with this capability. For example TCP. Otherwise your offsets my not produce the desired results. 2 Your post processor must be set up properly. I use this function a lot with good results.

We have a CR Onsrud 5 Axis Twin Table machine. We are happy with it. Support is very good. Their implementation of the TCP functions on the OSAI control can simplify your programming.If you choose to look further you might consider looking at: MultiAx (Italy) Northwood (USA) CMS (Italy) Heian (Japan) Good Luck

I do a fair amount of tabbing and have never had that happen. It sounds like a serious problem. If I had to guess though, I would look for the following. Is the problem occuring in an arc move (G2 G3) or linear (G1 G0)? If arc, the plane (G17, G18, G19) might be wrong. Or the direction of the arc. You can force Mastercam to output linear moves instead of arcs. Otherwise if the top of your spoilboard is at Z0 be sure to scan you code for Z-. This can be accomplished with a text editor such as notepad using menu: edit: find. Just guesses though. Hope you find the culprit.

For plain old 2d stuff AutoCad dwgs or dxfs are great. I have imported IGES but that is only slightly better than nothing.

If I understand the scenario correctly that you have 5mm of stock remaining after roughing, I would use surface finish parallel.

Welcome to the forum. Without seeing your part I will suggest the following as general ideas. I import some IGES files from other CAD systems, these usually consist of multiple surfaces. I use the "create curve on one edge" to make wireframe. Since the resulting geometry can be lines, arcs, or splines, you may need to do a little work to get suitable results. If the results do not lie on a uniform plane, you can use the project command to move everything to a plane. If you wish to convert the splines you can use "break many pieces" As to making nests to hold parts, I usually put clearance filets on the sharp corners of the wireframe to compensate for the fact that the bit cant reach sharp corners. I run a pocketing cycle + finish and use wear cutter comp to ensure a tight fit. Hope this helps. Tim

If you are still looking for an answer to the block drilling problem.... As far as I can tell from my experiments, if you have the block correctly defined in the machine, definition, and a drill block selected as your tool, Mastercam will deploy the correct drills automaticly based on the geometry that is present. There is good info on this in the help and the Mastercam resource guide. As for work offsets, I think you only have to define the lead drill by way of a work origin or distance from the origin that you are using. As for getting the correct tool codes, I would try to get help from the post developer or machine manufacturer. sorry I cant do any better than this. Let me know how it goes. Tim

Ok I'm going to verify a few ideas I have. I'll get back to you. Tim

Peter, I was hoping someone would clarify this issue for you so I could see how people configure Mastercam for drill blocks. I am still using our old software for block drilling, but will switch once I figure things out. As far as the actual code goes, I do it the way cdhastie suggested, though I expect with your OSAI they are refered to as User Absolute Origins or something of that nature. When I use multiple drills I designate one of them as master, and the rest as slaves, selecting only the master drill's geometry for cutting. Do you by any chance have horizontal drills on the unit?

quote: How do you get on? Pretty good actually. As you stated the manuals are fairly clear, but there are a lot of things to learn. There are quite a few Osai machines on the market. Ours is a CR Onsrud. They have supported us very well so far. X4 Router 3 Solids 5 Axis

Our OSAI machine does not have a drill block, but I have recieved the "M and dynamic mode incongruent" in situations where G0 was not the active mode when a tool was called. It appears that certain conditions must be met before the M code can be executed. Unfortunatly I don't know excactly what these are. This control is pretty new to me so I would be interested in knowing what it takes. X4 Router 3 Solids 5 Axis

I use a contour ramp with pass at final depth for holes less than 2 bit diameters. For larger holes I use pocket w/helix entry and finish pass. Setting lead in/out correctly will allow you to use cutter comp with most controls. X4 Router3 Solids 5Axis

You can create bounding box around STL to get snap points.