I've seen this, but it usually happens when I have resized my entire X window in the previous session I ran. The next time it starts it can use the same layout. Go to Settings, Toolbar States. You need to make one of the toolbar options your default layout by selecting it and then clicking in the checkbox called "default". If you are not sure which layout you were using, just highlight one of them and press Load in the middle of the box, that will show you the button layout.

quote: masking is clunky, for ex. analyseonlyarcs(click box twice)ok that's a lot of clicks to see a hole diameter I see that you said "click box twice" in your message. From that statement I'm not sure if you knew you could actually just double click on the type of entity you want to work with from the All/Only boxes. If you double click then you don't even have to press OK, the All or Only windows will close automatically. [ 08-04-2006, 07:14 AM: Message edited by: Rich Thomas ]

quote: I then click on an arc. it highlights an arc but never shows me the arc center icon when I am about to highlightYou won't see the arc centre icon as long as you are using the the MOA command. It worked out where ther centre is as soon as you clicked on the arc. quote: then I click on an arc and it says "selct arcs, hit enter when finished"When you see "selct arcs, hit enter when finished", it's at this point you should window the entire model, or press Select All in order to get it to *search* all of the arcs to match the one you initially selected.

What is your Highlight colour set to? The wireframe ofthe model is white and if I switch to MOA and move my mouse over the arcs, nothing really happens as my highlight colour is white also. But if I still click on an arc, it's value will go into the greyed out diamater box.

When you go to the drill toolpath and press MOA, does the prompt say "select arc to match"?. Try analysing some of the arcs, are they all in the same View? (the view # is at the top of the Analyze window)

OK, ummmm, have you got the Only (as in the All and Only buttons) mask set to "Maintain Only mask" and is it set to mask on something other than arcs?

I'm not particularly pink, but I'll try to help... When you are asked to select the "arc to match", select the arc itself, i.e. around the circumference, not the centre point. Then you should see the diameter box update to match the arc you selected. Then you can window or otherwise select the other arcs you want to match up.

I recall getting empty lines when I first started posting with X - now I think it was something to do with my "n"($) character being non-modal (as determined by the format statement). The rest of a particular postblock did not need to produce any code on that line (as nothing has changed since the last move) but the non-modal "n" meant that a line number had to come out. Check the format statements for "n". Of course I could be totally wrong too

I'd be interested to know how many people are saving their files to a mapped network drive, rather than saving their files to local local hard disk? I am trying to get to the bottom of a similar (but not identical) problem for a customer of ours. Thinking out loud here - have you got regen files (*.RGN) in the C:MCAMX-MR2REGEN directory? I'm wondering if Mcam reads the regen file (if there is one) when opening up an MCX part file. If the regen file is corrupt then perhaps this could explain the problem. If you have a regen file whose name matches the corrupt part file, try deleting it, restarting Mastercam and seeing if the MCX comes in any different to before.

If you are installing on a PC with Windows XP (Sp2 I think) then you will probably have to install later Hasp drivers on that machine before V7 with find the dongle. You can download them from here: http://www.mastercam.com/Support/Downloads...les/drivers.zip

X2 will improve Undo with Solids a great deal, but I can say no more at this stage!

If you are using X then go to the Autocursor config - this appears as an exclamation mark in the Autocursor ribbon bar (where you type in XYZ values). It's only available while trying to draw something like a line or an arc. (EDIT - ah yes Thad; I forgot you could right click and do it ) There are two vertical rows of check boxes. Usually all the boxes on the left hand row are checked, but only the bottom option on the right hand row is usually checked (horizintal/vertical). You may have other options set on the right hand row that are causing the cursor to snap to lots of positions in oter than the usual snap-points (I'd bet that it's angular!)

Claude, The problem you describe often happens when you're trimming arcs. You tend to see that "somehow" the arc gets trimmed back one way or the other to the 3 o'clock position. An arc is not seamless in Mastercam, it has a break point at 3 o'clock. So when you use it in trimming, one side or the other will almost always go back to 3 o'clock. If you are having trouble trimming with arcs, the best thing is to first break it yourself somewhere on the opposite side too, or break it somewhere close to the geometry you are trying to trim it to. Use Modify Break 2 pcs, or Modify Break at intersections. You could also try Modify Trim 3 entities but it's a little hard to describe it's use only in text. Go to the Modify, Trim Menu in Mastercam, and press the Help button. There are links to the Trim 1,2 & 3 entities options there, with simple examples. I haven't looked myself, but if you use Search and check for "modify", "trim" or "trimming" you should find something useful in there.

I'm sure I'm about to muddy the waters... I was unable to get client machines running with X using TCP/IP. I tried specifying the Servers' IP address but without sucess. V9 ran happily on TCP/IP alone. Argh. To cut a painful, several week long story short, I activated all three protocols in Windows (on the client machine and the Server), and then made sure that the Nethasp License Manager had all three protocols loaded. Only then could I get X to run with the Nethasp. When I did a bit of testing, I found that I was unable to get X running if the License Manager only had any two of the three protocols loaded - it needed all three or it wasn't interested. I'm sure that an overbearing IT dept. and the liberal use of Group Policies had something to do with it. This was back in August last year, and now I'm a little fuzzy on the details!

Stevieboy, I am having trouble with it too. Usually it happens when I select the "window" option from the selection bar (the one with the All and Only buttons). I find if I just draw the window using the mouse, without pressing the "window" button first, (providing you can get away without accidentaly picking up some other geometry) I don't have this problem. I'm sure CNC know about this one.

Hi Toast, I think you can do what you want by selecting the items you want to work with first, and then choosing the function. So you could select the geometry you want to delete first with windowing, or chaining etc, then you can press the Delete key or press the Delete icon. To change levels, select the geometry first then right-click on the word "Level" on the status bar, at the bottom of the screen. You'll find you don't have to confirm your selections this way. The same goes for changing the other attributes, like Line style and colour.

When you go into the View Manager, you have a group of five buttons on the right hand side. One of them looks like a No Entry sign. That button should reset your WCS, Tool and Construction planes back to Top.

Alt + T will work to turn off/on all toolpath displays... *if* your mouse is over in the graphics area. Alt + T does not work, if your mouse is over the Operations Manager (you can use T then, but it only applies to the selected operations)

Mark, quote: ---I got MC setup to default to Mori SV 50 machine on opening. It works like that when starting MCX, but switches back to Generic Mill when I click on file-new... There is a bit of a conflict here. In Settings, Config, Start/Exit, you can set up a "startup" machine. But if you go from Start/Exit, to the Files page, you can also set a "default" mill machine definition. It is this machine that X reverts to when you press File, New. So if you set that machine to the same as you startup machine, you should be good to go.

I know what you mean by "eraser" (no offence Thad ). In V9 and earlier, you could press Delete, then hold down both mouse buttons *at the same time*. Then you can just wave the cursor over the screen, deleting everything in it's path. Pretty cool. Eeerrr, yes, it's gone for 10 I'm afraid Something similar (but not quite so fun) is the "vector" selection, when you draw a line though the entities that you want to delete. You can choose via the General Selection ribbin bar, or press the Alt key, then: Left click to start. Double click to stop. HTH

You will find Xform Preview settings under Settings, Config, CAD Setings.

If you are using surface toolpaths, are you using the line & arc filtering, found under the Total Tolerance button? If not, you should be!

Bruce, I can repeat the problem you have there - I would flag that up with CNC. In the meantime I have something that may help a bit. When you have the window open to save the NC file, you can get a drop-down list to appear next to the file name. At the top of that will be the last folder you saved into, with the NC file name. If you select that, you would then (obviously!) have to change the name of the NC file at the end of it.

I haven't got the answer you are looking for Mike, but I have got something that might help (sorry all out of beer ) If you go to File, Edit/Open External, and right-click in the list of files, you get "recent files" and "recent folders" options, like you get in the File, Open dialog. I half expected it to list my recent MCX files, but no, it shows me my recent NC/PST files that I have opened. HTH.