I do a bit of this to engrave part numbers, drawing numbers or whatever on parts. My advice is not to chain your text with the window chaining options, but to actually chain all the letters of the text in the order you want it to cut. I have found that when you chain from a window and use an approx. start point the cycles can take minutes longer to run, because the toolpath seems to jump around from letter to letter, or parts of letters to parts of other letters. All of the transitions add up. A few mins chaining can save hours of cycle time if you are doing lots of parts. Unless you are doing come kind of complicated design, then why would you bother.....

Hi all, Can anyone tell me if there is a way to make the toolpath display show the cutter compensated tool centerline all of the time? What i mean is that whenever i generate a toolpath such as a standard contour using "control" for the cutter compensation, mastercam displays the toolpath with a standard blue toolpath line around the geometry i chained but it also displays a purple tool centreline toolpath showing where the tool will actually go when the cycle runs. This purple line displays on screen until I begin working on another toolpath or select another operation or do anything like that. From then on the purple tool centreline is gone until I regenerate the toolpath, then it disapears again when I do anything else. Can I make this diplay all of the time?