Hello Dale I am doing 'sort of the same thing" constructing a large sign. It is 27 by 12 feet and we are piecing it together. I am also using a shopbot for it. We created the sign on mc and drew 2 inch squares on the sheets on the screen. the students are making squares on the plywood and transfering them over manualy but we could easily put an engraver or pen attachment(simple to make for the bot) to transfer it onto the sheets using the bot) We wanted the students to be a large part of the project so that is why we are doing it manualy. I have never used the toolpath trim option but it sounds like it would work. I can send you the file if you wih just give me a shout back. Mike

Excuse my ignorance but how do you "paste" text into Mastercams text dialogue box. I tried it with no success. Thanks Mike

No iI haven't as I am trying to learn it on my home computer with my instructors copy. I do not have time at school to learn the surfacing features of Mastercam so I must do it at home after supper. I have played around with surfaces on a few of the computers at school with no problem. Very simple things like creating a rectangle and translating it but thats about it. Mike

Hello and thanks for the reply. I am quite new to surfaces so I can't really tell you if it occurs with one or more that none, etc. I took an online course a couple of years ago with 7.1 and we used multiple surfaces as part of the course with no problem at all. Since then I haven't used them until Router 8.1 on a couple of files and they both shut the computer down. They are not associated with any toolpaths. I just fired up router 8.1.1 and made a rectangle with the surface creation nurbs on. I did not shade it and translated it down an inch with no problem. I turned the shading on and it immediately crashed and shut the program down. Restarted it and did the exact same thing with a parametric surface. Same thing happened when shading was turned on. Fired it up again and opened another file (turntable) on ftp site. Shading was on and it worked okay, Went to trim surface to surface and it crashed immediately as I clicked on the command. Thanks Mike

Hello We do the engraving all the time and if it is not a closed chain it will give you an error saying"chain not closed skipping". Mastercam also doesn't like if any enities are crosses or not trimmed together. It will give you an error. we either do a lot of trimming up and searching for the problem chain or use the contour function as Jay said. The engraving and the convertor are nice although we haven't gotten the best results with the convertor. Usualy quite a bit of redrawing. Just my 2 cents worth. Mike

Yes I have. It helped with other problems likegarbage left on the screen, etc but not with the surface problem. I have it turned all the way down. Mike

Hello again. I am using 8.1.1 also. I have tried to reinstall the software to fix the problem with no success. We had mastercm mill 7 using surfaces on the same machine and it worked with no problems. Router 9 is supposed to be coming in a couple of weeks so maybe that will fix the problem. sure is frustrating. Thanks for all the help. It is realy appreciated especialy for shop teachers like myself. Fundking for training is non existent so the learning curve is steep. Mike

Hello It is a ATI Rage 128 GL Agp and I am running windows 2000. Mike

Hello jay Sorry I didn't know you replyed. Yes I am trying to xform-translate. anything I seem to do with surfaces causes the crash. Mike

Hello I tried your suggestion with no luck. I posted my file onto the ftp site under mc8 files. It is called turntable. I would greatly appreciate if anyone would take a look at this as it is driving me nuts. Router is shutting down almost every time I try to do anything with the surfaces such as deleting, shading, etc. I am trying to teach my grade 10 about surfaces and this is definitely not helping. Thanks a lot Mike Annetts McCreary School Mccreary Manitoba

Hello I am having problems with router 8.1.1 freezing and shutting down the computer whenver working with surfaces. Is anyone else haveing problems with the two. I have a pentium 3 350 with 128 ram and a 32 meg video card. The acceleration is turned right down and I have altered the allocations. Thanks for any help in advance. Mike Annetts McCreary School Mccreary Mb.

Hello With the engraving toolpaths all contours have to be closed I believe. i think that you want to contour instead. select with a window, enter the search point and have compensation off or centerline.

Hello-Whenever I start Router my cpu usage 100% and the programs realy drags along. Files take forever to get, display, etc. tried to change the allocations under config with no affect. Reinstalled the program with no change. Computer is a pent 3 450 with 128 ram with about 6 gig left free on the hardrive. It was just reformated and installed with win 2000. Seems to run fine with other programs such as office. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Mike

Hello-Whenever I start Router my cpu usage 100% and the programs realy drags along. Files take forever to get, display, etc. tried to change the allocations under config with no affect. Reinstalled the program with no change. Computer is a pent 3 450 with 128 ram with about 6 gig left free on the hardrive. It was just reformated and installed with win 2000. Seems to run fine with other programs such as office. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks Mike

Hello I also had problems with the rastor to vector but after trying different settings we get about a 50% success rate with it. I had gotten a hold of a digitizer tablet from ebay and tried to get it to work with Mastercam with no success. Tech support could not help and we finaly endeed up sending it back. Funny ending to the story is that I saw a Crayola (yes Crayola) drawing tablet at Radio shack for 10 bucks (reg 89.00). Hooked it up to the computer and it worked perfectly for what we needed. I just wanted kids to be able to draw stuff with a pen rather than the cumbersome mouse. (i thought our computer tech guy was going to shoot me after seeing it work. He spent HOURS trying to get the other tablet working. MIke

Hello Our school is trying to get a Summasketch 3 drawing tablet working with Mastercam with no luck. We have version 9 and are using the digatize C-Hoook. It Mastercam seems to recgonize it but the puck or pen doesn't seem to be working correctly. Can anyone using this tablet please email me as we desparately require some advice onits use and correct installation. Thanks Mike

Hello We(small k-12 school) are in the process of tyuing to get a summaketch 3 with pen to work with ver 9 with limited success. We are looking for anyone using one of this critters for some friendly advice. Thanks in advance mike

Hello I am having trouble translating surfaces with this version. Anyone else having problems? I keep getting an error message and the progrms automaticaly shuts down. Computer is pent 3 450 with 128 ram and lots of space on harddrive. Ihave changed the config file to allow plenty of memory for the program. Any help would be appreciated. Mike

Hello Our school has some end mills available to use with our wood cnc router. My question is: how fast can these end mills be run at before they are damaged or are unsafe? They are four flute ranging from .125 to .75 in diameter. They are high speed steel (I think). (Not much exp in metal working cutters). One last question: cann anyone reccomend any feed rates and speeds. we typically cut plywood, ash and strawboard (made with flax straw) Thanks for any help. Mike

Hello Anyone teaching High school students lookiing to trade basic tutorials, projects, etc. Mike Annetts

Hello What age of students are you teaching? Mike (another one) Annetts

I am having problems with uploading to the site, can I just email it directly

Thanks for the reply We are basicaly just opening a corel clipart and stripping the colors and then exporting straight to mastercam. There is no tracing or secondary steps. Like I said before we get tons of little lines and double lines. I have tried ungrouping the clipart before exporting and leaving it grouped with the same results. mike

Hello I am a shop teacher in a small school in Mccreary Mb. wa are exporting dxf files from Corel draw 7 into Mastercam 8.1. Our problem is that when zoomed up the dxf in Mastercam has a LOT of extra lines. Most are very close to the orginals. Is there any way to prevent this or easy way to deal with it.

Hello Duane Yes I would be interested in such a forum. I think it would help out everybody involved Mike