It would appear that tools defined in Mill can only be managed in the Mill Tool Manager, which will require a Mill licence in addition to a Lathe licence. Curiously though, I noted that - unless I've made a real mess of my tool libraries - the lathe_mm.tooldb has the full default list of milling tools if it is opened in the Mill tool manager! Has the lathe tool library always been like that? I hadn't noticed before in the last 25 years

Ah, fair point @JParis , my brain may have taken a shortcut when I read the word Tab

Using this technique below is a quick way of setting up Tab locations and programming them with the 2D Contour toolpath. Please note that the toolpath needs to chain 2D Wireframe and not the edges of of the solid model directly, so you may need to use Curve/All Edges on your solid models first.

I've been embracing the approach of having Stock Models at the beginning of each new stage of machining; if you select the appropriate Stock Model as well the toolpaths you want to review, then Verify automatically starts with that Stock Model. This might be helpful if the OP has been used to making in-process Stock Models and is used to to verifying with them in earlier versions. A down side of this is if you edit a earlier toolpath that subsequent Stock Models are referencing; it take a while to regenerate all of the models.

New laptop! 3m 8s by the clock Dell Precision workstation 7770 Processor 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12850HX, 2100 Mhz, 16 Core(s), 24 Logical Processor(s) Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB Nvidia RTX A3000 12GB 1Tb NVMe Mastercam 2023 Update 3

The main thing that has pushed the customer into upgrading is the fear of their old PC hardware (early 2000's era) finally giving up the ghost and not being able to replace parts. They just about managed to recover from a cyber attack last year too. The management has accepted the IT dept's long-standing concern that they are leaving themselves open to a production halt unless they bring their HW/SW up to date. I have since wowed them with some of the things modern Mastercam can do, but I honestly think if they could continue to carry on as they are with no production risks, they probably would!

We are also just updating a customer from Lathe 6.13! I started back around then, just before V7 came out

I was just looking up some other info related to Mastercam Wire and came across your post. If you have the profile you want to program as wireframe, you can add points using the Square style to where you want the tabs to be located (you can choose the square point style in the same menu that you use to draw Thread points in the Home tab, or your right-click menu in the graphics area). Then in the Contour path you set the tab mode to Manual and then select "use Square points"

Happy to hear that it's sorted!

Check the Edge Tolerance when you next try to use the Solids From Surfaces command - in Metric the default should be 0.075mm but I've known the figure to default to the English value instead which is 0.005.

I think you might already know this but you can double-click the Depth value in the drilling segment list and then right-click to bring up menu that gives measuring options such as "Z=Z coordinate of a point" - that takes you back to the graphics screen so you can select a point and feed it back into the depth window. However you might already be using it as you have used the "compute distance..." option which I suspect you pick from the same menu? Also you may not be aware that you can actually use commands such and Analyze Entity Properties or Analyze Dynamic now in Mcam 2022 without closing/hiding the toolpath dialog at all - just drag the toolpath window to one side and start using the Analyze commands (you could even copy the values from there rather than the Top of Stock field you have been using). Apologies if you already knew all of this!

FYI Fernando at CNC got the customer sorted... had to delete some registry entries for 2018 and then the customer had their keyboard shortcuts back!

Good point, I have asked the question about Onedrive and I'll see what they say. Thanks!

I opened X8, drew five rectangles and chained them in a single contour op. I then went to the Geometry section in the Toolpath Manager which pops up the Chain Manager window, and used the CTRL key on the keyboard to select two of those chain. The small square chain icons went darker in colour than the three remaining chain icons. When I pressed the Delete key on the keyboard, the two chains disappeared from the list. So using the Control key method works for me, not sure why it wouldn't work at your end, sorry.

Hi guys, Has anyone come across this one before? A customer of mine has had Mcam 2018 lose it's keyboard shortcuts (this was after some error messages came up this morning on startup which he didn't note down)... even F9 or ALT-F1 don't work. If we take a look in the CONFIG folder under his user login, the KMP file is in the right place, but if we go to the Customize Keyboard window in Mastercam, there are no keyboard shortcuts assigned for any function. We pressed Reset All in that assignments window and we get "Unable to open C:\users\<<user folder>>\my mcam 2018\config\Mastercam.kmp. The file is there and we confirmed that folder path is correct (comparing the folder path in the error message to the folder path for 2018 in Windows) I then sent him 2018 WORKSPACE & KMP files from my own PC, shut down Mastercam, replaced the existing files (which to my mind rules out an issue with folder permissions), restarted Mastercam but the same error message came up when we tried to hit Reset All on the keyboard shortcuts. I then found the "default" KMP on his own computer under C:\program files\Mcam2018\common\userdefaults\config\. We copied that file into the correct location, tried Reset All again but got the same error message. I am now stumped!

It used to be in the Toolpath Manager in older versions but now you'll find it in individual five-axis toolpaths that can actually use it such as Curve, Flowline or Multiaxis Linking

Just a quick update... Haas USA tell me that there is a bug in an older release of the UMC software that causes slow feeds in 5-axis when TCPC is active, so this is looking like the culprit. We've also ran the same NC code on another UMC750 now without a problem. So it seems Mastercam and the post wasn't at fault at all Thanks for all of your help and advice chaps!

Thanks guys We have already tried opening up Setting 85 to 0.05" but the customer told me that it didn't make a difference to the slow feed sections. We do have M11 and M13 before the G93 (and the G234 as it happens). FYI, For a while we thought the slow feeds were due to large C-axis motions between blocks in the NC code (because there were some large C-axis moves of 50 degrees for example in the program). Cimco has a Misc Real called Max Angle Movement and we enabled it and set it to 5 degrees... that didn't help. We then went down to 1 degree and it made the NC program three times larger but still didn't help with the slow feeds near vertical. P.S. Holy off-topic posts Batman! I'm so sorry that I've taken this thread so far off-topic by the way - I hate that when I see it myself!

This is great Colin, thanks I'll get hold of this programming manual. When the customer first reported this problem, the post was running in G94. Cimco enabled G93 to see if would help and it did help with feeds in some parts of the program but we were still getting the slow five axis motion near B0. We'll certainly give "medium" a try with setting 191 and we'll get Cimco to limit the max feed in G93 too. If I get some feedback from Haas I'll pass it along!

Thanks Mr. Crazy

Hi Colin, I'm waiting for the serial number from the customer so I can log a case with Haas UK. I will ask them to check the status of the software on the machine. I'm not sure at this point if HSM is active - again I'll be able to ascertain that once I get the serial number to Haas UK. Setting 85 is 0.025" and 191 is set to "finish" which I think are good settings as far as I can see (and the custom is running in inches). The 80 blocks per second is interesting though - we haven't tried looser spaced vectors yet. We are seeing inverse time feeds of over 500,000 and the machine hasn't complained about feeds yet! They are getting a "ROTARY AXIS COMMAND EXCEEDS PRECISION" error which might be down to the number of decimal places (four) in our rotary axis commands or maybe the rounding of the fourth digit.

I have a section of NC code below where the machine is moving very slowly: N1542 X-8.4168 Y-2.1774 Z2.5202 B.4394 C-63.5988 F594695.09172 N1544 X-8.4159 Y-2.1778 Z2.5203 B.4049 C-67.425 F594695.09172 N1546 X-8.415 Y-2.1783 Z2.5205 B.3724 C-71.9412 F594695.09172 I'm not too clued up on Inverse Time feeds but a value of F594695 appears (to me anyway) to be a reasonable value over such small moves (plus this customer runs in inches) but the machine really slows down at this point. At slower feeds, away from B0 the machine is moving faster over similarly short distances/angles. It may be possible to reposition the job but this a porting job on a car cylinder head and I don't think there is a lot of space to spare in the machine. I don't want to go into detail in case I am being watched... but let's just say that "trial and error" doesn't go down well at this firm so I'm trying to pick off the low hanging fruit first!

Sorry to resurrect an old thread but I'm digging around trying to find out why a UMC-750 sometimes slows to a crawl when doing five axis milling, even in G93. Has the Haas got a reputation for slowing down when running five axis code (especially near B0)? If so, was the UMC-750SS specifically developed to address this situation?

I've seen a report of this too - the user has 2021 Update 2 but was not using Nesting; they were deleting wireframe and moving solids around at the time. Looking through the files' properties, there are references that go all the way back to Mcam X7 so perhaps there is some compatibility issues with legacy files (obviously it might be something else - just speculation on my part).

Restmill is really a development of Surface Contour and that was not designed to machine flat areas. That ability was added to Surface Contour later but from what I remember (been quite a while since I've used it) Restmill still doesn't target flat surfaces. You could try Optirough and activate the Stock page to make it behave like a Restmill style operation. Set the stock to leave on floors in the Model Geometry page to zero.