James, How is the sim attached on the inside of the computer? Does it just flop around at the end of the cable? I would be afraid of shorts if the computer was ever moved and the sim ended up in contact with something on a board inside when it was turned back on. Do you have a custom "fan" cage inside where the sim is somehow attached? "Inquiring Minds want to know". Interesting setup all the same. It might be something we could consider if we have to go onsite for training.

Nethasp has saved us a lot of hassles but that's because our training rarely travels. When we do go to a customer site, we always know ahead of time how many HASPs we will need and only take that many. I always take them off the computer at the end of each day and keep them with my laptop case. If you have a large class though, I wish you luck. You could probably rig a cable system and string it through the screw holes of the HASPs. Lock them to the computer case and that way they'd have to take the whole thing. It'd be pretty hard to learn the software without the computer. It would also be very noticeable. My father was a teacher long ago where he loves to tell the story of a student who consistently didn't have note paper and always borrowed from others. My father one day asked if the student had paper and when the student replied "no", my father proceeded to supply him with a roll of TP. Back then it wasn't "Cottony Soft" either. The student never "forgot" his note paper again. Nothing to do with training Mastercam but I thought that would be a funny story to tell the Forum.

Gord, I'm sorry I didn't understand your situation. I'm glad Dave was able to repeat it and see what was happening. Can you create the Groups after the operations and move the operations into their Groups later? Can you download the tool .mc8 to the FTP site? This is good to know in able to provide proper support.

Ken, Creating a COONS patch surface would give you the best result in that gap. If you had an arc or spline which better defines the cross-section of the gap where you need the surface, you could create it with 2 patches in mind. There is a third party product called Moldplus that has some really excellent features for editing multi-surface designs. You can view this product from this website: http://www.moldplus.com/.

gmenzies, What you are describing should not be possible in any of Mastercam's products. Operations are the toolpaths. You can't have one without the other. Are your operations collapsed? Try a Backplot of the operations. If you get an error saying there is nothing to show, that's a real problem. If you can download the .mc8 file to the FTP site, someone with Lathe could take a look and see if it's in your file or if there's something going on in your system.

Kuei, Welcome to the Forum. The best training is from the reseller. Being an instructor employed by a reseller means I'm biased, but there are college courses which recognize the most widely used cam software in the world (Mastercam). Where are you from in the US? There are also resources available from this very website. If you exit the Forum and look at the bottom of the page, you'll see Resources. Click on that to go to another page which shows some manuals and the Home Learning Kit. This will give you a start.

You're all welcome. Whether I have too much time on my hands or not is my concern. At least I don't reply to every single forum topic as some do. No need to name names. It really didn't take me too much time though, once I knew how to do it. Just thought I'd contribute to the holiday spirit and forum conversations. The real time consuming bit must have been creating the shark in the first place. Hats off to those who do all the hard work and don't get the proper recognition for it.

Here's a GIF of the shark that was "knitted" into solids in V9,b3, colored and animated with PS pro v7. I don't know how to show it on the forum page but you can copy it from the cadcam FTP site. It is located in the "All jpeg, gif, photos..." folder as Shark1.gif. Have fun and enjoy the holidays.

Marc, You may need to download the Win XP HASP drivers from Mastercam website. I do know these drivers work with V8 but am not sure if they work with v7.2c. It may be time to update to the latest version of Mastercam through your reseller. If you update now to V8, you should receive V9 when it is released shortly. There are so many new toolpaths and things that make V8 much nicer and user friendly. Version 9 is expanding on that ease of use and including some even better toolpaths.

To All, Why not simply export as a Parasolid (x_t) file from UG? Mastercam will convert it directly and you can bring it in without wireframe. I'd much rather have the solid or surfaces from a parasolid to work with instead of an Iges file. I can always extract wireframe using Create-Curve menu to get the edge curves that I need from the part.

Randy, The Cimco Editor full version has a Backplot feature of NC file information. The Cimco Editor in Mastercam is the OEM version. You can go to www.cimco-integration.com to download a demo of the full editor and view the backplot of your nc code. The tools would have to be set up in the editor but you can even backplot from the end to the beginning. It will highlight the lines as it's showing the backplot on the screen. It's some pretty cool stuff for an editor.

We have also added dimensions to our "cube with words diagram" to help with the Cplane and depth association. Creating dimensions in the Isometric Gview and Cplane make this more visual when the model is "spun" in the Dynamic view. It may help to draw the cube as just lines first, instead of allowing the student to produce it their own way. Start them walking and they will run on their own. I also like to use the "paper and pencil" analogy when dicussing Cplanes. The XY axes make up a piece of paper and the Z axis is the pencil which is used to draw on the paper.

I instruct users from all skillsets and industries. The Solids course we offer is two days, 8 hrs/day. That is more than enough time to cover most of the solids information to get them started. I agree that every student should be exposed to solid modeling. It is the design method which is quickly becoming the only method used in high-end CAD packages. Mastercam's parasolid kernel is the same used by other systems so using it will also provide a basis of knowledge in those other systems. It is far easier to design using Solids, than trying to develop multi-surface parts. I've programmed customer parts from design to code in a matter of minutes when it would have taken much longer using surfaces or wireframe. Have fun with it. Your enthusiasm will trigger enthusiasm in your students.