Oops, I meant "saved me big time"......darn typos and quick fingers....... Thanks again.

Thanks, I got the same advice from a guy on the cnczone forum and he walked through the process over the phone. he saved me bid time. Thanks for confirming the process. Chris

Hey guys, I have a question that I need help with. I want ot know if there is a way to modify a Haas 4 axis post to output the A postion to only 3 decimal places? Up until now we have manily been doing indexing with our rotary. So we would get the output for the specific angle rotation needed without the trailing decilmal places. Now I have a project where I have to engrave on a cylinder, and the output is going to 4 places and our mill cointrol only reads to 3 places on the A axis. any help you can give would be appreciated. Chris

Thanks for the help. I was hoping it would be something simple that I could adjust. I'll tinker around with it and see if I can come up with anything close to what the machine cycle is.

I was kind of thinking that would be case. I know other CAM software has the ability to compensate for this and gives you a time factor parametr that you can adjust to get close to your physical machine cycle times. Chris

I was wondering if there is a setting that might be in Mastercam X4 to tweek the backplot suggested cycle time of an operation to what is actually reflected on the machine. anybody know anything about this We are noticing that the backplot suggested time is not reflective of the cycle time at the machine. We aren't altering anything at the machine either by doing cycle feedholds or anything like that. I've seen as much as a 25% difference with the machine cut time being slower than the MC suggested time. Any help would be appreciated. Chris

Yeah we have, I think, 2 add-on seats of it. Though neither of them are on my pc. The main thing is trying to fulfill the request of our graphics dept. Though the issue arises from their final printed images not matching the vector for cutting, so it takes hand measuring and adjustment in the shop. But thanks for the suggestion.

Hi all, I new to Mastercam and also to the forum. A recent request has come up from our graphics dept to get some sort of training in setting up illustrator files for us to cut on our router in the shop. We've had some success in this but it takes a little work to get right. A project was done about 6 months ago, where one of our programmers had to cut a bunch of graphic panels that were shaped like people, having the printed image on them. A few issues were run into in getting this complete. It turned out the graphics when printed didn't quite match the clipping path created in Illustrator for cutting on the router. So after the files were turned over to the shop, the vector files needed a bit of editing in Rhino3D to make the vectors match the actual printed graphic, due to some distortion in the printing process, then the cutting began. It all worked out well in the end, but our graphics dept sees the intermediate step as unecessary, and feels the files should be able to be brought right into MC and ready to cut. I tried to explain to them that no matter where the file comes from either 2D or 3D there is always the possibility that it may need some editing on the shop end to make things work. They are requesting to get some sort of training that will better help them prepare the files for us programmers. So I thought I would pose the question to the forum and ask for some help. Does anyone know of any tutorials or customized training options that would address this? I've been to the basic MC class so far, and need to attend the more advanced classes, and it seems to me that the regular classes wouldn't address this issue for our graphics dept. Any help you guys can provide would be useful. Thanks, Chris