If you have a tight and square machine, and your parts tolerances aren't too tight its very doable, an the return is worthwhile. One thing not mentioned here beyond inspection capabilities are the reduced setup times you can gain.

Wish I knew a fix. Importing ops, tool paths, and copying and pasting tool paths is always questionable. I still do it anyways, and just plan on possibly spending more time fixing it then starting from scratch All I can recommend is giving up on problems early on, calling tech support and having them tell you "that's weird, never seen that before" a few times a week gets old, and expensive

From what I am gathering from what they are saying is that they have outside contours where they can keep the tool down at the bottom Z plane and move in between parts. I don't think its a common scenario myself.

I understand that, its all I do. But I also know this, most modern machining centers they move so fast you are going to have a hard time getting 40% savings, and by hard time, I mean impossible. Lets say your Z depth is -1.25", you have your retract set .25" above the part, that means you have to move a total of 1.5" in, and 1.5" out, for a total of 3". Now lets say you only run your machine at 1187ipm rapids, that means it moves 19.78"/second, which means that 3" of movement takes .15 seconds. 100 pcs x .15 seconds is a total of 15 seconds, which means for a 40% savings your cycle time for 100 pcs would need to be under 45 seconds total/.45seconds per pc. If you are running at full rapid on a new machine (2362ipm) this time gets cut in half. Also I would be VERY surprised to see 24 tools on array of parts that can actually stay down at full Z depth in between parts. In a lot situations having no retract isn't possible due to fixture and part constraints. I think that this for me is the biggest surprise, is how you have so many parts where you actually can do this, all the other parts on my tombstones are in the way, and a lot of the work is done in cavities where of course this won't work. I still think having the transform op using the tool paths linking parameters differently would be nice, but I think the transform operation has other things that need more attention.

I feel like I am not understanding something, how is this saving 40% off cycle times with this problem? Are your plunge rate feed rates really slow? Do you not have rapid retract set? I do agree that it would be a nice feature if the transform/translate would only use the clearance value (when set to "only at start and end of operation") at the beginning and end of the transform op, but with some forethought with the linking parameters to start with, I'd be surprised if you would save more then 3 minutes on an hour long cycle.

I got it working by creating a dummy circ mill op on the drilled hole, ghosted it out, and then used that ghosted tool path for the rest material. Work great. Still wondering why the drill tool path didn't work, I've used it before.

I am trying to do a a dynamic rest mill tool path using a 7/16" em in a small pocket that I pre drilled with a 18mm drill. For some reason I cannot get the rest mill tool path to recognize that the hole has been drilled regardless of setting the rest material to "all previous" or "one other operation" (the drill tool path). Any ideas?

Yeah its a stick font. I actually designed the parts (manifolds) in SW for a customer, and I had to put assembly instructions all over them so that they install them correctly. SW 2014 advertised this new stick font specifically for engraving procedures where you don't want double line fonts, and don't want to make an extrude cut into the part. Guess they forgot about the part where it needs to get exported with the model... It's just a new feature that I wanted to try out, apparently it doesn't work from what I have found on the SW forums. The MC text function is pretty lacking which is why I was trying this method out. Have you ever tried MCFSW Joe?

Also I found a video on youtube showing MCFSW X7 engraving sketch text with a contour toolpath, that is sweet. Is MCFSW stable for running multiple custom WCS's for HMC type work?

Yes, I also tried a few different colors from the base of the solid. Analyzing the solid in MC appears to only yield the solid. Is this working for you?

Well it doesn't look like its possible: https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/9235 For the guys using MCFSW can you engrave sketch text in there?

Hmm I couldn't get either AP 204 or AP214 to bring it in. So far it doesn't seem to make a difference if I am bringing in the whole assembly (preferred) or just a solid/part.

Is it possible to import a solid into MC that has Solidworks single line sketch text on it? I have a bunch of SW assemblies I am importing into MC that have single line font text I need to engrave, but they don't show up in MC. If I can't is there anyway I can import solidworks sketch centerlines? I could use the lines for adding text in MC if I have to then.

I started doing this too, but then I ran out of room. I've recently started buying drills and taps that perform in most stainless' and aluminum, so I don't have to have 4 types of M6x1 taps in the machine. The performance or tool life is a little less in some materials, but I get more space in the matrix, and less tooling to stock and manage.

Don't waste time organizing by any sort of type. Something will come up at some point and throw a wrench in the works. Like James said, work on trying to make each cutter count, it might seem like you have a lot of holes to fill now but they disappear fast.

Are you guys still looking at the HX800 Tim?

I think the needing steel/cast iron etc for tombstone for "heavy" work is a common misconception. It certainly isn't going to harm anything, so if you have the weight capacity then its not too big of a deal, although it does accelerate wear on the machine. I wouldn't have the slightest reservation about setting up a 200lb block of steel that needed heavy hogging on a 1.5" thick aluminum angle plate or tombstone. Yeah I know, its crazy. It actually seems to be getting more common. So many techs just level it and leave. And that might be a good thing, because they probably couldn't square it anyways. The 500mm granite 5 sided squares are heavy, I wish I could have afforded a Ceramic one, those are actually pretty light. I think Ceramic are the best for service work because they are so thermally stable. But you do need a good Pelican case and you have to handle them carefully. The granite ones really need to sit in the environment they are used in for a while to stabilize. Over 300mm is a common squareness value, but is a REALLY poor indicator of squareness particularly on these newer hmc's with big Y travel. its pretty easy to get .under 5 microns YZ squareness over 300mm when you put the square on the pallet, throw a 500-600mm square on the pallet and trying to get under 5 microns over 600mm is another story. This is why I mostly have aluminum tombstones, and then add steel wear surfaces to them.

Of course not having a proper foundation is a problem, albeit a different problem then what I was talking about. Sorry I said always? What I am talking about is most hmc installs I see the techs are often not even bringing a square to the job, and if they do, its a 200mm. Which is a problem when most 300mm hmc's need at least a 500mm square to get YZ done properly. For lots of parts without 90* side features you can get more parts on a wide 4 sided tombstone (column being as wide as the pallet). This can push you close to your swing limit for the machine, and if the parts have a lot of Z thickness, you might exceed the swing. This is where a 6 sided tombstone can shine, because with 6 smaller sides you can sit closer to your center of rotation and fit inside the swing.

If you can use an off the shelf tombstone I like KURT, they are made in the USA and have great prices on a reasonable amount of sizes. Tombstone city are Taiwan MFG iirc. In certain cases rolling your own can be a good option too. Really just comes down to what you need. I have about 20 tombstones in my own fms, and have made another 10 for other people, and they are all a bit different. You need to get all your parts together, figure your cycle times, fixturing costs etc and go from there. It is best practice to put all your locating and tapped holes in yourself. I would make absolute sure you do have the machine square though. One thing I have learned about HMC's is that techs always do a xxxxty job on YZ squareness. Level and square are completely different. For most things Aluminum does fine tombstone material. I have about 6 tombstones in my FMS that have 1-1.25' thick walls, 356 aluminum, and they do fine drilling 2" diameter holes in 304ss 26" off the pallet face. If you are utilizing all your Y travel, cast steel or iron adds up fast in the weight dept. 6 sided pallets RARELY offer an advantage on smaller parts, unless you need to hit more then 3 sides per op.

I'm glad they locked this down, modifying the stock views has caused me all sorts of grief. This should be a positive step in multi plane work. I'd really like to see the view manager be dockable, no idea why its not, drives me bonkers. Its really bad when you have over 20 custom views. Ron's ideas for sub folders and color coding in the view manager would be kick@ss. Also if they could make the create wcs by geometry, solids etc more robust that would be great. IE, should always maintain associativity unless you select otherwise.

Thanks Jim, Codemeter fixed my problem, and now I have been able to link my account and login.

How did you fix this? I have the same problem.

Countersinks suck for engraving. You can use a 1/16 ball end mill to do the job, no need to go down to a 1/32. We use 1/16" 2 flute ballmills to do 6061-304, and we are making details and letters as small as .06" tall. For really small stuff we only do about .001" ADOC, for letters above .100 we use .002-.003 ADOC. 10k spindle is just fine if you are doing smaller details because most machines do a poor job of making nice arcs and lines that small when moving over 20ipm (some machines more like 10ipm or less) It sounds slow but goes fast because the detail is so small.

I wouldn't hold your breath. Gibbs has only had this for about 10 years?

There aren't any techs locally that even have a square large enough to square that machine, let alone do the procedure. You've got problems other then surface finish if you can't stage a tool while the machine is running.