what are you going to scan with?if you use your mill you could use a reverse post and then backplot and save as geometry.

If the spline is planar you can creat,surface,trim,flat boundry, and select the spline to creat a surface. you will have better luck working with surfaces reverse engineering and then creating a solid from Surfaces.

Sometimes i use a G44Tx tool length comp. I don't know the g code for your machine.

what are you using poly lines for?

unless you are going to use rev quick or Raindrop geomagic. I wouldn't use point cloud data. I would take points where i needed to to creat planes,lines, arcs, and splines and work from these to creat surfaces. also i would recomend not brining in alot of data at once it can be quite overwelming. i like to use planes as much as possible because you can trim them to each other. check here rev quick

i think you could speed up some of this by using fplot to either set your vectors and or creat your planes. something like Iskander teh showed in his post, Variable pitch threads ,anybody interested ?!? I could't tell you how to do it but I bet some one out there can. mastercam forum

are you trying to do a C axis and B axis move then cut with X,Y,Z? if so yes send me a simple file and i will show you how to set it up. if not what are you trying to do?

Is anyone out there using MasterCam to program A Mazak QT 10 with T1 controler it is an 80's machine a customer recently bought. does the standard post work for this machine?

I have cut a couple of things here on our 3 axis. the problems i had was mounting the work rigid enough, and not having the proper tooling to cut al. with a 18000 rpm spindle with little torque on the low end. also the spindle is not mounter rigid. as far as the controler It is great for 3-D patterns. I would say you would be pushing it to try to cut al. molds on one.

I can't say much about illegal immigrants except that if i were from a country where i couldn't feed my family I would go where i could feed them even if I had to swim the river and be illegal. alot of Illegals I have known in the past work circle around US citizens.

a little under 2500 here plus some contract work.

I think i got that error when i opened a file with solids in it that were created in inch but my config was MM

ELAD, did you use screen-next menu-plot chg prams then type 1.0 in for scale. or is this a printing problem?

I think the loss of traffic would have a negative impact for the site. if i don't want to read o/t topics I don't. on the other hand if everyone is on another site they won't be here and you won't get as many responses to your questions. My question is who doesn't like the site with O/T topics and why?

are you working in inches or metric? does it do it if you start a new file? what configuration are you using in or MM under screen, configure?

I hope we are able to buy the maintenance contract. I like to keep current. from the side of any company like CNC software ( not that I'm employed by them or any thing.)to stay i business you need a constant income stream .that means mastercam needs to gain more of a limited market and come up with new features for us to buy. If they don't they will fade into the sunset and we will have no support at all. the maintenance contract will help insure they are around to support us in the future. Maybe you have heard of the company that built oilfield engines so well that they didn't need to replace any parts after five years of constant running. they sold a lot of motors up front and then went out of business. because they didn't have a constant income. and now you can't get parts for those engines so you have to buy new engines for big$$$$$. that is not a good cycle believe me. the same thing has happened to many software companies and when it does it always costs the users because they end up buying a similar software to replace the old. I think maintenance contract is our friend as long as CNC software keeps moving ahead.

for cutting die models with a 5-axis machine. i always write while i cut because i have a better feel for the model as i go.plus as you say the programming is at a lower cost since the machine is running.

Thermwoods use g17,g18,g19 so im sure they cna cut arcs in those planes.I did find this in the post but don't know what it means. I don't know where the guy that wrote our post is it was written for version 5.5 ptpmatrix # Toolchange with no matrix force top view m1 = vequ aaxisx m4 = vequ baxisx m7 = vequ caxisx ptlchgpmx # Toolchange angle calculation, Y axis of view is C angle if fg1014 = 0, ptpmatrix if m6 > .0002, "ERROR-THE Y VECTOR MUST BE IN THE TOP VIEW PLANE", e if m6 < -.0002, "ERROR-THE Y VECTOR MUST BE IN THE TOP VIEW PLANE", e vtoolx = vequ m7) caxis = atan2 -m4, m5 while caxis < 0, caxis = caxis + 360 while caxis >= 360, caxis = caxis - 360 if prvc > 180 & caxis = 0 , caxis = 360 axisx = vequ caxisx irotv = rotv -caxis, vtoolx baxis = atan2 irotv, krotv p_b_test

this is what linarc shows but since i only know enough about posts to be dangerous i don't know what it means or how to change it. plinarc # Linear arcs if the toolplane is not top linarc = zero if m4<>0 | m5<>1 | m6<>0 | m7<>0 | m8<>0 | m9<>1, linarc = one if fg1014 = zero, linarc = zero

I am using a 5 axis post modified for a thermwood. my t-plane and cplane are set to 3 . I will look for linarc.

I am running mp.dll 9.16 I can't find 9.17. they are full circles and the paths are either contour or circle mill.

these are 2d arcs.

I am cutting circles on the back plane when i post them they come out as a thousand lines. i have played with my filter settings, arc in xy,xz,yz that changes nothing that i can see. i changed do_full_arc : 1 #Allow full circle output? 0=no, 1=yes from 0 to 1 and helix_arc : 1 #Support helix arc output, 0=no, 1=all planes, 2=XY plane only from 0 to 1 but still no luck . any ideas thanks ahead of time mill 3 V9.1 sp2

I have had problems like some how my wcs changes to some unknown view, and since i believe the c-view and g-view are relative to the wcs my trim paths get messed up. i shut down mastercam trying to fix the problem and some times it fixes it some times it doesn't. I think it might have something to do with windows 2000 or mabe the fact that my machine writes to 2 hard drive so that i will have a back up.

I have had this problem before.all i did was close mastercam and reboot my computer and it worked ok. useing v9.1sp2 on dell 2.2gighz 1.5 gig ram running win 2000 pro.