I use a excel sheet, to track all my macros. That way you can type a little explanation. Company part number. Then you can turn on autofilter, and easily find certain macros for a job. Looking for what macros you have for a company, just click the bar and it will seperate easily all the macros for a specific company, or click the part and get those macros for that one... Jim

The more you idiot proof, the more idiots you find Jim

Peter, Mastercam 8.1, I have never had this problem. Hopefully it is a one time event. I have made much more complex assemblies than this before. I dont know why it had this happen. Specs, the machine is a dual 3.0 xeon , 2 gig ram, pny quadro fx1000 128 meg card, dual striped sata drives and on win xp pro. Wish I could post some of my files on the ftp, but I cant do to customer nda's. jg- I also use alt a. Saved a crappy copy for me As for the backup. I setup a primo file server for the shop. pent 2.8 with 1 gig o ram, with 4 drives 2 striping 2 mirroring. Excelent machine for a file server. I also use one cam station as another backup. Cannever be to cautious. I made a little dos batch program I can click off the desktop, that runs around to all my critical file areas, and xcopy all the latest files over to the cam computer in a seperate directory. Plus every month I have a 1.5 gig usb hard drive, to transfer files for home. The good news, I was able to recreate my work in about a hour. Seems the solids all got corrupted. But the underlaying design geometry was right where it was suppose to be. So recdreating the solids went relatively easy. But the file still had errors just pulling it all up. So did a dsave some and windowed my geo to a new file. Worked great. Jim

Turned off shading, and called the file up. Same error. Also at the time of crash I was at .02 Also getting this error as I play with it.. "no matching op file"

I am a little flustered right now. My file with 17 complex solids I been working on for 2 days, just got dumped somehow.. When I pull the mc8 file up. I get this alarm. "cannot find solid referenced by history file" If I click ok and move on. I can go click solids, hoping to find my tree. But all it does is crash mastercam... And I was just thinking to save it as a different name in case Any ideas, I have never hit this one before.. Jim

Well if you draw your s shape from the top plane. Pick one of the end points of the s. Offset that line in each direction, .125. Draw a line to each end point of the offseted lines you just made Now translate it down .25 while joining. Now if you look at it in dynamic view. You will see a box in going down. Click cpane and click 3d. And creat,arc,tangent, 3 entitities. Click the bottom line, and the 2 lines going upwards. This should create your arc on the bottom. Now trim them up into the shape you need. And hopefully you have the item you want to sweep. Solids,sweep It will say chain items you want to be swept. Click the items you just made, it should be a closed chain to do this. hit done till it says along path. And click your s path starting where you just made the geo for the swept. That should grab your shape you made, and pull it along the length of the s, cutting everything in its path, or making if you said to create. Anyhow hope that helps. Hard to explain things over the internet sometimes... Jim

I dont know about the swirl in the rope, but if you are trying to get a round shape to interweve like a rope. You can create circles through out where you want the rope to be. And loft em through. The hard part is to keep its orientation. So what I do, is create a circle, break it by mid point 3 time. So you have one half, and 2 quarters of a circle. Now change it into 3 colors, so you always no where the proper start point is of the circle. Helps with chaining the right direction as it interweves. Jim

quote: HAAS = you get what you pay for... Agreed, I will never pay for a machine again, that has a picture of their service vehicle on their website. Or one that brags about within 24 hour service. I rather have a machine tool, that takes them 5 days to get to your shop. Since these machines I will most likely not see their service technician for 6 years. Jim

Change the view to the side, draw the shape of the ball emill, and extrude it through the part from the side... Jim

I know this isnt the same thing. But I have been slowly working on building a rc m1a1 tank for myself and kid. I love doing little projects like this with my kid. Atm I am working on its transmission, motors, and lights. I will probaly have it done in a year I hope Also some fun stuff I did with my oldest kid, (4) We built a trebechet together. I let him help me cut wood and screw it all together.. I know the treb is unrelated but fun none the less.

blowing off the table must be a all day event Jim

I have a feeling no matter how fast the rapids are, it will still look slow Jim

Tool fab--- when I say setup guyz, yes these guys do run the machine to. So yes they are overtrained operators. Takes out the boredom for them Jim

quote: This machine is only 6 months old. I would hope were not having issues like that yet. I will check it out though. I did already have to replace the belts. Thanks again peeps! Well you did say rebuilt, so I thought I would mention this. If it was rebuilt, the machine under neath is problay alot more older than 6 months. Jim

Could add 180.0 into your work offset to compensate for the bad 180? bad fix but should work. Or G90 G52B180. At the begining of your program.