OK - it'll be in V9.1 as a keymap-able/toolbar-accessible function. PDG

ThreePres, Thanks a lot. We try. James, No, there's no V8 version of this. I could probably do it easily enough, but would need a reason. PDG

ThreePres (and anyone else), I uploaded a C-Hook to Jay's FTP site to strip the 'history' information from a Solid created in Mastercam. It's called NOHIST.DLL and it's in the Mastercam_forumC-Hooks folder. The advantage to having a 'history-free' Solid (or what we also call a 'brick') is that it is smaller in size, loads faster, and you don't have to worry about losing track of the wireframe used to create the solid. Of course, the downside is that you cannot make changes to the way it was made. PDG

No, it is not possible. PDG

Are you running Win NT, 2000, or XP? If so, let me know ([email protected]) and I'll send you a new version that we had to put together for those OpSys's. Sorry - it's not on our Website yet. I'll talk to our IT people about that. PDG

Positive arcs are counter-clockwise, Negative arcs are clockwise. PDG

Mr. D, Like Scott said, thanks for 'fessing up. I hope you will also encourage the person who gave you the illegal software to come clean and go legit. We here at CNC Software take piracy of our product very seriously, and your source is obviously using a 'black market' copy of Mastercam for which we never saw a dime. PDG

Zero, You should only be seeing the problem when using the X, Y, or Z method of selecting the plane. I also found that it's sensitive to use of a construction origin (Alt-O from Cplane menu) as well, and isn't limited to just WCS. If there's an alternate C-origin, and you say "X" = 0, it'll put the plane at the true world 0,0,0 point (brown axes) and not the construction origin (green axes). I should be able to have it taken care of in V9.1 PDG

You're right - it is something stupid! You're asking for assistance from legal users when using an illegal copy of Mastercam. PDG [ 07-10-2002, 03:16 PM: Message edited by: ProductDevelopmentGuy ]

I'll take a look at it here. I tried a couple simple examples on my own and they worked fine, but I'll download the file and look at it. PDG

I'm there Sunday through most of Tuesday. Getting out early so that I'm not flying on the 11th. Call me chicken.... PDG

Scott, et al, Coming soon in V9.1 - "Toolpath Nesting". Define a toolpath and nest it, rather than defining the geometry, nesting it, and then putting a toolpath on everything. It'll work very much like the Toolpath/Transform functions. PDG

I have passed your questions and the .ZIP file to the Wire developers, and we should have an answer for you by the end of the day. PDG

JSpangler, What about the Mill Tutorial book? That's we're you'll make toolpaths! PDG

When is CadCam going to invest in a spell-checker? What the &^$ is a "Hather" anyway?!?!? PDG

Mark, That's what I found too. I walked through the debugger with these surfaces and Parasolid's offsetting function burped on the trimmed offset, but if I untrim it, the offsetting works. I'm looking to see if there's something in the way we use their offsetting function(s). I also wrote your surfaces out to IGES and tried to import them into SolidWorks. I got an imported surface entity that could not be stitched into a solid body, and there was a funny looking wrinkle where the trimmed offset surface and the tiny trimmed non-offset next to it met. So it looks like SW hasn't completely solved this either. We just got Parasolid V14 in-house, so I'll also give it a try with that. PDG

This was indeed a common problem in V9.0 that I thought we had addressed in the SP. I'll take a look at the file. PDG

Yes, this is planned for the next major release of Mastercam PDG

The TEST*.C files that we ship with the C-Hook kit are all that we supply. I admit that it's probably not enough. We'll continue to work on it. PDG

I hate to tell James he's wrong (especially since it hardly ever happens) but in V9 the DXF reader can handle whatever you throw at it - all the same entities than can be stored in DWG can be in the DXF and we'll read it - even Solids!. That's part of the new libraries we're using to parse the files - they don't care whether it's DXF or DWG PDG

Use Screen/Next/ToClipboard and then go to Paint (or some equivalent drawing package) and use 'Edit/Paste' to drop the image in. Then save it in whatever format is available. PDG

I agree with Peter Scott. Please consider getting some real Mastercam training. This forum can be helpful, but a class or two can go a long way toward getting you started. Please note that the helpful people on this forum may quickly tire of "rookie" questions. PDG

Michael, Please e-mail me the SAT file ([email protected]). I'll take a look at it. PDG

Michael, Sorry - it sounds like you tried writing DWG from Mastercam. There's currently no support for writing Solids to DWG. Perhaps you could output an SAT file? PDG

Analyze/Dynamic gives you tangent vector info. Maybe you can use that. PDG