I've only used live tooling on a lathe that had actual interface programming, and it would do the same thing so we just had to tell it that the tool was meant to rotate the other direction. It only did it on some of our holders though ( I think the 4x RPM multiplier holders) and not on the 16x multipliers... Not sure how to manage this in mastercam. There may be something that you have to set up in the machine definition to manage this, but again, my experience with those tools are limited to controller based programming. Hope this helps anyway. brendan

Does modifying your spindle direction in the tool setup parameters change it?

Welcome to the forum!

sounds like you know what you neeed

Thanks for the advice! I switched over to containment boundary amd the results are the same...still 0.5mm off boundary edges

surface finish parallel.bmp Hi everyone, Having a little difficulty with a toolpath. I'm using surface finish parallel in X5 to clean up a section of a cyclindrical face in a channel feature. I have selected the inside surfaces of the channel as check geom. with 0 stock to leave. I've set the stepover to 0.5mm, and when I generate the toolpath, it is leaving 0.5mm on the inside faces of the channel (see image). If I change the stepover to say 0.25mm, it leaves 0.25mm on the inside faces. I may need to use a different toolpath, but if I am using this one incorrectly could someone please point out to me where I am going wrong! Many thanks in advance! Brendan

Hi James and Welcome to the Forum! Im sure you'll find this a great resource for learning more about the software, get answers to your problems, and also share your knowledge with the rest of us! What's your game of choice? Brendan

Rick that sounds like a strange fix! It happened to me this morning and I ended up having to load another toolbar state and then reload my custom toolbar config to get it to work. All i did to make the autocursor toolbar disappear was drag it a little to change it from a fixed toolbar to a floating one...weird!?!

Hi There, I'm pretty sure what you are after is in the config file, not the operation defaults. To Change this go into settings > sonfiguration > verify settings tab at the bottom. From here you can change the default to clock, cylinder or file, and modify a few of the settings. Make sure you save the changes to this file else it will only work on your current running window of Mastercam. Having said this, my version seems to have a bit of a mind of its own and will change itself sometimes based on the last part that I have machined

Do you have viewsheets active?

If you tell it to use multipasses, there is an option for finishing amount on it...just set it to run 1 roughing and 1 finishing pass. You can elect to only run the finish pass at the final depth as well if you like

+1 to spaceball...you will probably need to recalibrate it

Great thanks for your opinion! Like I said initially, the main purpose of getting CATIA for us is the ability to bring in native formats from a large customer and make alterations etc whilst maintaining the feature tree. Good to have an idea of what we will be getting ourselves into and how this compares with other familiar software. Initial cost and maintenace is not an issue for us. I look forward to learning another package and increasing my skillset some more. Thanks everyone for your input! Brendan

CNC App's guy...have you had any experience with NX? It is a fairly comprehensive piece of software too as far as toolpaths are concerned. How would you compare them?

Thanks everyone for your thoughts on the matter. I should've mentioned that we are working aerospace and large assemblies/complex surfaces in some cases. I guess the picture that is getting painted for me is that CATIA is great at high end surfacing/machining, but for simpler work mastercam handles better. I really do like mastercam for the work that we are currently involved with. I will admit that I have not had proper trainng in multi-axis or 3D surfacing toolpaths in mastercam, but I was quite skilled with them in unigraphics and from what i have witnessed it is not mastercams strength. Thanks again. Brendan

Thanks for the responses! Have any of you had any experience with the CATIA training courses? I'm not sure of the specifics but I'm sure we will invest in at least the fundamental training courses. Do you think this will be a sufficient for someone with a CAD/CAM background to get a useable handle on how to work the software? Obviously they won't come off the training courses as an expert, but just as far as basic solid and surface manipulation, are the training courses good for learning these aspects? Keeping in mind that we will still have solidworks there as our primary package

Hi evryone, We are currently using solidworks as our primary design software and mastercam as our primary CAM software. We are looking to buy a seat of CATIA because we are doing a lot of development work with a company that uses CATIA to design, and we wish to maintain Solid histories/feature tree. I have aquired a sample version of CATIA and my initial thoughts are that it looks pretty complicated! I worked with Unigraphics NX for a couple of years and I guess it seems more like it than solidworks. Besides the pricing, can anyone give me accounts of there experiences and how CATIA compares as a CAD package, but also as a CAM package? We will definitely be keeping solidworks as our primary CAD software for now and will keep mastercam as our CAM software too. Any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thanks Brendan

Have you tried screen-> unblank entities? There coulod be some entities that you cannot see on the screen because they are hidden or blanked.

I think that there are a few options to get you a decent career. I'm 23 at the moment and doing a university engineering degree externally. I have a mid level programming job at the moment, and have only got this based on programming and experience in manufacturing. I completed an apprenticeship and have done a few other short courses. For me, a degree is learning more about engineering in general, and broadening the scope of my future...I'm not sure I want to be programming cnc's in 30 years time, and if i wasn't doing a degree IMO it would limit the possibilities and options for my future. I agree that it is hard to beat experience...but having said that, noone comes fresh off there degree expecting to earn 6 figures...you still need to prove yourself and expand your knowledge through practical application before you will land yourself your dream job.

are you sure you cannot customise the standard mastercam activereports? I have not tried to but I would have thought it possible...

I believe that you should be able to do this by going into the tool manager, right clicking and selecting import/export tools --> report or detailed report. I'm using X5 MU1

Hi Thrash, A sample piece of code would be great only if it doesn't take you long to whip up. I'm familiar with a couple of other scripting languages but havent got to C# yet. If you could get me a short piece of code that could work I'm sure I'd be able to tweak it to my purposes! TIA Brendan

bump

Backup works...the way we mostly do it is when a new either of us create a new tool we just go to the tool manager and drag it across to the library. 2 programmers here...running everything off network as specified above.

No Problems, Glad I could help