I believe the max feed for a Haas trunion is 40000. That may be your problem

Yes, because the actual toolpath is a spiral, not a helix

No, as long as you've got the taper angle set in the threamill parameters, it'll come out right

I have good luck with parallel to multiple curves and morph between 2 surfaces. Under utility/ surface radius based feed rate optimization, I set the 4 feeds to 100, 10, 10, 10. I hadn't had any problem with gouging, but when A/B swing around an arc at full speed, I really don't like the way it looks. At 10% it's much smoother.

Which toolpaths are you using? On the newer toolpaths, under advanced federate control, you can slow down the feed when going around edges. I use it when doing impeller blades to get a nice smooth path, otherwise when the tool goes around the front edge of the blade A/B swing around wildly.

no stink or coagulation with goldenwest 5470 Semi syn. $100+ per pail. castrol; priced that on MSC...ordered more 5470 I saw that, the price at IDG is about half of what MSC wants. Material is mostly aluminum, with 17-4, 15-5 and 718

We've been using Blaser, but we have a huge problem with Monday morning stench. We got a new machine about 3 mo ago so I filled it with Cimcool. It seemed to work good, however after about 6 weeks, the chip screens started clogging up with this gooey gray snot. We drained it, cleaned it all out and refilled it. All was well until here we are, 6 weeks later the screens are all clogged with snot. Also, I like my beer with a head on it, but not my coolant. The inside of the machine looks like a bubble bath. So, Needless to say, Cimccol is out. I've heard good things about Castrol. Anyone using it?

Never worked with this material, but we've done a lot of Teflon, UHMW, nylon, etc. What works quite well are router bits.

The only reason I ever found to draw the threads, we had a job a couple years ago that had a large thread in the middle, and it had a 1 deg tolerance on the entry angle to the thread. So I drew in the thread so I could verify the threadmill op.

Do you have a G17 active?

Are the start and end points too close together?

I'm going to look in to this. First snag, I don't think my CP/m fortran compiler will work with Windows 8.

Try saving your rest stock as an STL, and use CAD file for your trim stock. That'll tell you if the problem is with your stock model.

I was thinking of something like that, not as a macro but just as a stand-alone program that would re-calculate all the x,y, and/or z values based on an input offset. No reason it wouldn't work for full 5x, the actual math behind it is all jr high school algebra.

.020 in Y? Sound like somethings wrong.

I wish there was a box that said, "Minimize number of gouges" then I would have a new best friend

Just curious, How far off are the tilt points? Since you only have 2, wouldn't it be easier to just regrind the table of the taller one and make them both the same?

Thanks, it seems so obvious now.

I use Opti-rest everyday, one of my favorite toolpaths. I always use the Cad file option for my stock, which works great except that, then I have separate files. I'd like to use a Stock model, but I don't see anywhere to select it.

Well I found a solution for the time being. The E420 only has a 7k spindle, so I programmed everything to run at 10K, so now it has to run on a Haas. Still, it seems there should be an easier was to change your origin.

I find I have better results using an STL for the rest stock, than with the stock model. Big problem there is you have a separate file.

I use opti-core and opti-rest everyday and have been very happy. They are extremely easy to program and the toolpaths are fast and smooth. So far I haven't had a single mis-cut. However, I do know a few people who've had gouging issues running it on older machines, so they need to leave more stock. I always leave .020 without a problem

I thought switching to incremental mode was pretty straight forward. I'm using opti-rest for several operations, and for the steep/shallow selections there is only absolute, I think. Am I doing something wrong?

The other day I was watching a re-run of the rifleman, and this dufus kid was whittling a chain from a solid piece of wood. I got to thinking, how would you go about machining a chain from a solid piece of steel? Food for thought

I know what you're talking about. I was having the same problem in X6, but untill I read your post I hadn't realized that the problem had gone away. Say the top of your stock is 0, and you create a drill cycle and the value in the top of stock box pops in at, like, -13.5546, or some total bs number? I just figured it was an X6 glitch that got fixed. But you're having the problem in X7?