Good stuff, probably learnt lots too which is what makes our work interesting ;-) and all done on a weak Haas (cough) all you nay sayers !

Is under - files, converter, autodesk

Try find the Titex , or now walter, tec selector download. The just apply to your needs.

Thanks for all the suggestions. A number of things to try.

Does anyone have any tricks for getting clean hole free solids into MC. Often when we bring in .xt parasolid files we find small holes in the surfaces and breaks in the edge curves. This is only on free formed surfaces in moulds generally and most often come from solidworks cad package. Is there any thing we can do at our end to minimize this as it can cause a real head ache when programming mould cavities and cores.

We work as a sub contractor to a medical instrument company and machine a lot of 17-4ph stainless for them. Two batches ago they supplied us some material for a job that we have been running for the last couple of years and we saw awful tool life and rigidity issues. We complained about the material and were told and shown certs to say the material was correct. After costly cutter wear and slowing the feeds by 30% we decided to get the material tested. It was done by a local university and came back as being in spec but certain alloying elements were high and others low in comparison to some "good" material we had. Basically all added up to the material being 30% tougher in tensile strength !!

use a decent cutter, not Garr ! Best cutter I ever used on this stuff was a silmax HM118 a few years back. Not sure if they are available where you are. also looks like you have the cutter in a sidelock holder, which will equal run out and bad cutter life due to one flute working harder. try using a high precision collet style holder - Albrecht ones are great.

"power milling" is the concept of using the dynamic tool path but with a large step down and step over to remove large volumes of material quickly. Is only applicable to high rigidity and horse power machines. Good alternative to the high efficiency approach if your machine has limited high feed ability but plenty of power and is rigid. Well that is how it was explained to us at a Mastercam reseller run demo last month.

The banding or faceting effect is something I have always struggled to control on a consistent basis in Mastercam.

No comp applied and we have double checked the numbers, there is definitely a machine fault.

Thanks for this info Murlin, could be helpful. I did some test cutting of a rectangle at varying places on the table and could get a repetitive error at different places and interestingly when I turned the rectangle 90 degrees the error moved with it. That is we were getting an overcut in the short side aligned with the Y axis but when we turned it the error stayed with the short side and moved to the X axis. So definitely seems to be some sort of control issue rather than mechanical.

Yes that's right Matthew, me and Mick live in the land of Metric, ie anywhere other than the USA But I still consider 0.03mm a big error, a lot of our parts are toleranced to 0.01mm.

Thanks for imput Mick and rodger. This is a test we are going to try next, different positions on the table and also try cutting the rec with long side in X and then rotate 90 and try in Y and compare results.

Thanks for reply Gcode, Axis are square and we are cutting a square part ok just getting irregularities in rectangle sizes.

This is with our local Haas service tech but thought I would hit up the forum too as there is a wealth of knowledge on here that can be tapped into. We have a Haas VF3 that is cutting rectangles out of spec from one axis to the other. That is if we finish cut a rectangle with a single contour cut we will see the right size in the long side but about 30 thou of a mm difference in the short side. This is only happening on shapes with a large variance between length verse width (rectangles) . We can machine nice and round bores and bosses and squares come out the right size in both directions. We have had the back lash checked and there is none, and we aren't seeing any lag marks at changes of direction like in bores or on bosses. My only guess is that there is an error in some type of thermal compensation so we are getting a difference in adjustment that highlights on parts with large differences in dimensions in x verse y. Any thoughts ?

+1 on helix in 5 axis circle mill, we do exactly the same thing with spot facing at compound angles on curved surfaces for both bone screws on implants and pin holes on surgical instruments and would love to be able to helix them. Currently use the 5 axis circle mill with small depth of cut and a slowed centre plunge rate, but helix would be much faster.

I used to have a macro recorded that would do this sort of thing for me on a file import along with changing colours , moving things to levels etc Such a shame we lost the macro function.

I uninstalled the latest driver and reverted to an old one to fix this. I was also having issues with it not releasing control in Vericut with the latest driver.

Titan would have cut that at 800ipm on his Haas , lol

Requested that selection method a couple of years back and was logged as a enhancement request then.

Hi Murlin yip that works, but shouldn't have too as everything used to work fine in X8 so something has changed. Suspect it has something to do with the 5 axis paths being plane aware now and our post not handling the cycle as it should. Anyway post writer is trying to fix it at the moment.

Gcode Yip see the 4 point 2 point thing all the time with varying files but have never had the output problem just seems to be some sort of memory going on even though the there is only 2 points selected. Points are just there as I used the hole axis function to create the axis and generically have the points and circles on. Usually still select endpoint of axis line though just to be safe. I have tested the file with the generic 5 axis post too now and as you say there is a rotation being posted so can only assume there is something funky going on with our post with X9 that wasn't happening with X8 so have sent through to Dave at postability to check out. Thanks for your help.

sample file temp.mcx-9

Hi Gcode Thanks for reply, nope all planes set to Top.

Is anyone having issues with X9 - 5 axis circle mill ? We are not getting any axis rotation output when posting new and proven programs. Nothing has changed in the post between X8 and X9 except the usual version update and I have done a compare between them and see nothing significant changed