Good plan, Jimmy. I get my Internet service through the cable TV company and it has been OUT since yesterday. Actually, it went out Monday during the freezing rain we were having but came back on Thursday morning. It stayed on until about lunch time yesterday and stayed off until about an hour ago. It has been on and off 4 or 5 times since then. I'll be lucky to get this posted before it zonks out again! My 14 year old son, Ben, is all decked out in Panther gear. He is going to a Superbowl Party for the youth groups at our church tonight. They have a big screen and plenty of food. I was not invited. I hope I don't have to go looking for some rabbit ears. Last resort, I will dial-up and check here for latest. Thanks- Paul

Yea, I think it ought to get suggested to Myth-Busters, especially that KKK angle. They'd have to prove that hard-headed as KKK people are, they still have a soft spot for falling bullets. As far as that CNN story goes, probably the hardest part to prove would be if it would be possible for 10 of them to rake up $7500 bail money. That's the part I find hardest to believe.

Katie: I can't believe that Jimmy would accuse me of buttering you up for a MC T-shirt! What I need is a calendar. Paul

Hey Jimmy: Gus (the horse) just got new shoes as a matter of fact. Bring 'em on. You have a good New Year, too.- PBPaul PS: Katie is the pretty one, not you.

Now Jimmy! I don't want to come right out and "throw off" on your good looks and smarts and such so I guess I'll just tell you this joke. I may have seen it here first, so my apologies to the originator, if that's the case. This little ole lady confides in her doctor that she is having terrible gas. Fortunately, she says, when a little slips out, nobody can hear it and it doesn't smell bad either. He gives her some pills and tells her to come back in two weeks. She comes back madder than heck. She says she still has gas only now, when she farts, you can hear it in the next building! At least they still don't smell, she tells him. "Well good" he says. "What can be good about it" she asks? "Well, now that we've got your hearing fixed" he says, "we can go to work on your sinuses." Happy New Year- PBPaul

How thin are they making car roofs these days? Nah, I humbly disagree. A .22 bullet weighs something like 40 grains, probably the same as some good sized rain drops. The only thing making it come down is gravity but wind resistance keeps the velocity from ever reaching anything like that at which it left the gun. Anvils and pianos is what I'd be on the lookout for. PBPaul [ 01-01-2004, 02:55 PM: Message edited by: PBpaul ]

This may or may not help but it reminded me of a similar problem we used to have. Is there any chance the original ellipse was created in Autocad? We had the same facet problem trying to machine those but found that if the ellipse was exploded before export, then it cut fine. PBPaul

Doug Z - What Oppiz is saying is go to Main Menu, then Toolpaths, then Job Setup and look under Feed Calculation and be sure "From Tool" is selected.- PBpaul

Hey PDG: Worked great! Thanks a bunch.....that little doozey will save us a lot of time. Thanks again- PBpaul

Thanks! PDG, I'll report back shortly. Zero, nope, every surface so far has come in fine. PBpaul

Hello all: I am saving drawings in Rhino 3SP2 as an IGES and bringing them into Mastercam Mill9 but I lose the Layer Names I had assigned in Rhino. Whatever was Layer 1 in Rhino comes into Mastercam as Level 1 and so forth but the names are missing. Anyone have any experience with this and maybe know of a solution? Thanks- PBpaul

Mayday: Don't know if this will help you but under Screen -- Configure --Filter Settings, there are values for Min and Max Arc Rad that you might look at. Also, at Cad Settings -- Rectangular Shapes, you can set a corner fillet radius. If none of these helps, just be glad it is finally Friday. PBpaul

Mick: Thanks for starting this thread. I hope it gets us all riled up. I too would like to make use of this feature, as many others have stated, but just have not jumped into it yet. I'm so new to learning Mastercam itself that it may be a while yet before I can devote much time to learning scripting. Maybe some others are in the same boat. The fact that I used to write all sorts of programs in plain old BASIC....is that gonna hurt me or help me?. I could whip you up most anything right now in BASIC but don't have a clue as to how to do anything in Visual Basic. Are there similarities or do I need to totally rethink? PBpaul

Talk about bogging down! My kids got on my wife's computer and after a few visits to Kaaza, I suspect, her computer had so many pop-ups and so much crap running in the background that her bookkeeping software virtually stood still. These parasites feed on each other, install themselves, and invite their buddies. I wound up using Spybot S&D as others here have already mentioned, to clean it up. I found a website called www.doxdesk.com where you can get descriptions and information on the manual removal of some parasites. Interesting reading. PBPaul

.....and you, too, Bucket- Thanks- PBpaul

Thanks, David. I appreciate the help PBpaul

Running Mill9SP2 When doing toolpaths for ordinary 2D contours, on the Contour Parameters tab, everything comes up with Absolute already selected, which is what I want, except for Feed Plane, which comes up Incremental. I'd like for it to come up Absolute by default, also. Is there a switch for this somewhere? Same thing happens with Lead in/out. It comes in selected by default and I want it unselected by default. Can things like that be changed? Thanks for any info- PBpaul

James: Took you 6 min. Dang you're good. PBpaul

What irks Jimmy (and me) is the total unfairness of it all. Those guys don't even remotely have to play under the same rules and regulations that we do. Make the playing field level and we can all compete but make us pay minimum wage, make us carry workmens comp., make us register our vehicles and insure them, make us buy a business license, make us conform to OSHA, etc., etc., but don't require that of China and just watch the plants close in your town, too! Not to mention outright stealing of ideas and technology. Attend one of the big trade shows like the one in Atlanta every other year and you see reverse-engineered moulders and planers and what-have-you that were simply copied. I think I see more Taiwanese knock-offs than Chinese. In any event, in this country, patent laws and ethics stop us from doing such. I recently went to a big flea market/gun show in Hillsville, VA and a particular .22 automatic rifle caught my eye. This one was used and for sale for $150. It looked brand new. Upon closer examination, it was made in China. Now if you know your Browning Arms history, Browning was made in Belgium years ago. Then it moved to Japan. A Belgium made used Browning .22 rifle like the one I was looking at costs you about $450 dollars. A brand new one on the rack right now will be made in Japan and will also cost you $450 dollars. So there sits this stolen Chinese dead-ringer copy for $150. We gotta get riled-up! - PBpaul

Thanks- I will try to machine the files you uploaded and see what happens. Strange thing is, as long as I have comp turned off, all these contours machine perfectly. With comp on, CCW splines do fine but not CW. I may be able to get around the issue with Autocad but we also do/plan to do a lot of importing from Rhino to machine surfaces with very small cutters and so that's another reason why my red flags are up. PBPaul

I really do appreciate the help but I'm still not understanding where I went wrong. Our customer sent us an Autocad drawing of an opening that we are surrounding with a wooden arch. We drew new splines (also in Autocad) to clean up waves and errors in the original and then did offsets for inside of trim, outside of trim, and so forth. Then this was brought into Mastercam and we did all the toolpaths and posted and promptly ruined the maple blank, which represented a whole lot of work down the drain. We then discovered that as long as we didn't ask Mastercam to provide tool compensation, it ran fine. We also discovered that as long as the tool is pretty large, as when cutting out the perimeter of the arch with a .76 dia endmill, that runs perfectly. Should it be standard practice to convert splines to arcs before trying to cut? If ever there was a vanilla spline, this is what we thought we were drawing! Thanks again. I'm still all ears!- PBPaul

Murlin: How so? I have a copy of your file downloaded. What am I looking for? Thanks- PBpaul

I'm still stuck. I've uploaded PBPaul.zip to cadcam's FTP site and placed it in MC9_files folder It contains my drawing It contains my .pst and the .txt that goes with it It contains 2 NC files as examples It contains a brief txt file re-explaining problem I would greatly appreciate any suggestions. I'm running Mill9sp2 Thanks- PBPaul

OK, there are no G41's or G42's anywhere in the NC file. There is only one G90 and that is at the beginning when the spindle moves to a specific position to receive the first tool. Then it moves in XY to the location of the first plunge (still in G90), moves down to the Retract Height, and then it changes to G91 and stays incremental until the part is finished or else another tool is called for. In this instance, there is only one tool and so the file ends, still in G91. I'm doing the 9.1SP2 thing this morning. If the problem is still there, I'll send the drawing up to the FTP site and wait for more help. Thanks to everyone on this thread- PBPaul

I'm writing from home......had to go nite-nite. First thing at work this morning is to search for anything odd in the NC file. I do know that almost all moves in our files are G91. We start in G90 to move spindle to an absolute position to install a given tool. Then we change to G91 until finished with that tool. If another tool is needed within the same NC file, then we go back into G91 and move to that same absolute position to manually change the tool. Once the manual tool change is made, then we're back in G91. PBPaul