Well Ron, Whenever I contact my dealer with something, they can't help me. Invariably I can come to the forums and find the answer that i need. So instead of asking a person that makes me feel like the village idiot, and then can't help, I take out the middle man. Yes I know that's what my company pays $1000's for, but I really would rather ask here. No offense meant to my reseller, but thats how i feel about it. Answers like "Hmm that's weird" and "Well mine works" aren't worth the effort to dial the phone.

I am having two problems with generic Mazak 4 axis post.

First-no matter what I do to post or control and machine defs. the curl up and down in high

feed toolpaths come out as lines instead of arcs. In fact, all the arcs created in xz or yz come

out as lines. Where might i be going wrong?

Second- I can't seem to get the same post to generate a tool call for a single tool program.

Forcing tool change won't do it. I'm sure this is an easy fix, just not easy enough for me.

If someone could help me with one or both of these, I would be most grateful.

I haven't tried the smaller ones yet, but iv'e been drilling 20x with 1/2'' and 7/16'' Titex drills. We have been most impressed in HRS, and Beryllium.

Going to drill 11'' in P20 this week. I'm not expecting any non pleasant surprises. At 15 inches feed on 1/2'' in HRS we get about 400 holes. Its one thing to see it on Utube, but to stand there and see it for real is a kick. We get a fair deal from our Walter tool Rep.

Rocheev1,

And so it is. Time for true confessions. As my SET file has done its job just fine for so long, all i did was run it thru update to current version. It's from, oh about X. New one is just what I need. I'll just make my custom changes to the new one and go from there. I was out for 2 days, so this is my 1st opportunity to get back to you. I thank you. This should stop the whining for a bit...Right!!! Anyway, thanks that'll do it.

Tim

Good day all,

The tool information has a spot for manufacturer info. I would like the .SET to pull info from this spot that is actually tool location in Vidmar cabinet. I, can of course access this, but can i code it so the info will be posted as a string that I can then format and add to my post? I haven't done any serious post work in over ten years and am dealing with the old useit or lose it syndrome. If someone can help walk me thru tis it would be a welcome addition to my setup info. Foremen can't find the tools specified. Mostly the out of the ordinary tools that is. Of course the easiest way to get the info is to make the programmer provide it. Thanks in advance for any assistence rendered.

Tim Kozak

Deka Batteries

Lyon Station, PA

Bump.

We're getting a demo for X ,so I'm still open for any other comments on advantages of X over ProE despite having ProE in engineering department. Thanks all!

Thanks all,

Heading out the door with a little more ammo. Some folks at work are on my side including foreman and lead-man. We'll see...

OK, Here's the deal. I have a 9:00 meeting on Wed. the 14th to try to convince my compnay that they should get 2 full blown seats of Mastercam as opposed to Pro E. We do mill, wire and lathe, with live C. I have used MasterCam since ver. 6. (8 yrs.) How is the learning curve on X from 9.x? Can I get a really good translator for Pro E since that's what our engineers use? I hear that the learning curve on Pro E is oppressive. Any thoughts? Sorry the thread is so late, but I know that there have to be some good replies for me by morning. Help!!!

P.S. Thanks Dave Thomson

Phil,

I dicovered a little trick that I really like. Set your linearization tolerance real tight like .000001 then set your filter to .001 or .0015 or whatever. The filter then seems to be more inclined to convert the spline path to an arc path. I'm not sure why it works , but filter never seems to convert to arcs unless the l-tolerance is set real tight. Works for me... try it. You've got to filter though or the path will be insanely large! Regards, Tim

I was wrong these aren't the ones that are used by the define tool. Sorry!

I think if you go to mc9Millpostssetup you will find the GIFs in question. I suppose you can alter their appearance, but I wouldn't know how to add/delete a new button.

WWW.RAZORSHARPGRINDING.COM

We use and are very happy.

When you backplot with a tapered endmill, with tool display on, the display lays right where it should. If a radius is added to the tool tip, the display is not on track to where the cutter should actually be. Does anyone know a trick to make it display properly, besides setting the corner radius to zero?

1. I (club symbol from playing cards) my wife.

2. local tattoo parlor "f*** yes it hurts!"

Is there more to using this than just unzipping it to chooks directory and then Alt C mmouse? Could something running in the background be interfering with it? I'm not too savvy to chooks.

Has anyone succeeded in using this on a 2k Pro system? No one here can get it to work

For strewn about the floor were...

My God! We don't have a maintenance agreement!

I'm working on revising an HTML Setup sheet. I think it was put in the FTP by Millman. (htmlrasser) I have a few questions, but will address them and fix them one at time. When finished I will make available to all if that's appropriate. The area of the post that I'm working in is the pnuts routine. 1st Is there a way to pass the xy stl and the z stl values to the setup sheet? Also why do I have to run my post 1st, then my setup, to get a proper setup sheet? If I don't the setup sheet comes out "squirrely". I have some other questions, but these are good for a start. Thanks already for your assistance.

Problem is sometimes tricks are obscure and even too many hours in front of the screen sometimes doesn't yield same tricks for different people. Talk about too much useless knowledge, who remembers using edlin in DOS to labor over batch files and such?

Bullines, That's the one I was looking for! Thanks to you and Brent. Where does one aquire such tidbits of info about windows?

This trick is great, but is there a way to show all drive trees collased by default. There are enough drives on the network that opening explorer with all collapsed would be useful. Thanks, Tim

Noel,

My Greco set-up is set at 9600 on pc com port. If you know what parameters you want checked, I can do that for you.

Tim

Thanks Steve.

Jack, This is our biggest machine, and moving to another, sometimes is not an option. It has run reliably, for the most part, but we would like to be able to boost the read speed to accomadate the 3-million+ lines kind of stuff. Small moves just slow the feed to an absolute crawl. Also,sometimes filtering just doesn't make it.

Thanks to both of you 4 input.

Regards, Tim

Does anyone know if there is a feasable way to beef up a fanuc 6m controller so it can read larger amounts of code faster. The Leblond Makino it's leashed to is used to do 3-d for thermo forming molds. A program that should run in 24 hrs can take 2-3 times longer because of the read speed. The Greco link its tied to could be some of the problem but I think that even speeding up the link, it will bog down on only being able to consume the code so fast. I know I'm asking a lot, but you folks always seem to have SOME ideas. Thanks in advance. Tim Kozak