This may sound silly, but are all of these 3d mice fully compatible with mastercam? I do not have one on my pc, but the boss has an old asteroid, and he uses it for solidworks, but not in mastercam because he claims it is not compatable? We will be getting issues new work rigs in the next couple of weeks so would be an ideal time to put in a request for one if it will work with mastercam. I only use mastercam here, no other cad/cam package. I used to use an asteroid with NX at my last workplace and know how valuable they are! having said that...ive grown fairly efficient with the old mouse and keyboard combo and hotkeys!

Are you using check surfaces as well or just containment boundary?

Greg Have you sorted out your problem yet? If you want to upload the rpx files to the ftp, I'd be more than happy to take a look at them for you tonight...or you can email them to me if you dont want them to be public? PM me if you want my email address

+1 gcode. Post file locally, then transfer to machine... What problems are you having?

All of our mastercam stuff is from a network location and we have never had issues with corrupt files. There is only 2 of us here though. The last place I worked at with NX we had heaps of trouble posting over the network...kept getting erroneous code.

M04 for internal threads top to bottom should be climb milling Which is how i would do it. Other than that, everything should be the same as you are used to.

The biggest PITA that I've encountered recently is getting the max z-depth to output for lathe...i know it is so simple and there is a datafield dedicated for it, but it just doesn't work for me. There must be something subtle I'm missing...

Yeah Kevin I spent quite a bit of time developing the activereport setup sheet that we are currently using. I had not much of an idea about it when i started, but had a lot of things that i wanted to achieve with it. I've run into a lot of issues with them, and had a lot of help from a few guys on here in developing it. But there is still some things I havent worked out with it yet that are driving me crazy! NOTW-programmer has been helping me make a few improvements since i put it up on the FTP before Christmas.

Probably also I would make a copy of your activereports now so you can always get back to this point if need be. Brendan

Ah ok i get it, i thought you'd added more captures into your rpx file. To me it still sounds like something is not right with your actual setup sheet files. So the next thing I'd be doing is trying to isolate the problem. You could try and remove the link to your subreports from your main rpx file and see if the setup sheet works then. If it does, there is something wrong with one of your subreports, if it doesn't, there is something wrong with your main sheet. Are you running the setup sheet locally or from a network location? No problems for trying to help! hopefully we can get it fixed for you.

have you tried removing the images from your activerport and seeing if that fixes the crashing? I usually try to make a backup of my activerport before making changes just in case something like this happens. I found once with my setup sheet there was a certain datafield say 'operation name' or something to that effect. When i removed this, the active report would crash! I never worked it out properly, so i just kept the field there, but set the display properties to off. I would guess there is something wrong with your images you have inserted. Do you have an older version of your activereport you can roll back to?

What do you use it for?

Hi Greg...when did this start happening? Was it after you changed something? Or are you just starting to use activereports? Or is it just out of the blue? When was the last time you used activerports without it failing? Usually this will happen when some aspect of your main report or subreport is not defined correctly. A little more info might help.

LOL Nice one ninja!

Literally you just need to click on the text that says 'note1' and delete that text and type new stuff there...too simple right? see attached picture. Brendan ss2.bmp

Hi Jake, If you want to access the fields in the attached picture, you need to use the "DIALOG1" thru "DIALOG7" data fields, not note1 etc. is this what you are trying to achieve? Also, what is your report datasource set to? HTH Brendan ss.bmp

Hi and welcome to the forum! I believe that the lead-in angle that you are talking about is just that...for most threads I do not see that there is much use for this, and mine is left at default of 29 degrees... If you were starting the thread part way along your bar however, you would want it to lead in at an angle rather than straight across or plunging. HTH Brendan

In your finish groove parameters page, under the overlap section, you can change the method to "select overlap". In the picture attached I have selected the endpoint of the back chamfer for both points of the overlap and the result is one nice clean finish pass. Have a play with these settings and see what you can get!

Craig that is what I would do as well! I use the finish pass whenever I want the first pass to be deeper like this.

In your finish groove parameters page, under the overlap section, you can change the method to "select overlap". In the picture attached I have selected the endpoint of the back chamfer for both points of the overlap and the result is one nice clean finish pass. Have a play with these settings and see what you can get! HTH Brendan

I've always found Sandvik to be the longest wearing turning inserts that I have used...but pricey. We use mostly iscar here because their sumotec inserts are fairly good, and much more economical than sandvik when you compare machine time / edge to cost.

Sorry Darin, Im not familiar with doing what you want to do. Can you change the values in mastercam after it is verified? Maybe someone else is more insightful than i am! Glad I could help with your first problem though!

Darin, If you go to your control definition and to the "arcs" page, and change your arc center type to "radius" this should output only R values HTH Brendan

Right click in the operations manager and go to display options. There you can toggle plane display as well as other settings! HTH Brendan

Have you got the "keep tool down" checkbox active in your depth cut page?