The quick way around this is to do all your file transfers as parasolids.

Bulletproof. As long as you are not hopelessly out of date.

I have three of five references:

1 Owner

1 Manager/Director from a multinational company

1 Supervisor

All my immediate superiors when I worked with them. All good people. I usually get an interview.

Not sure it really matters as long as everyone in your company is on the same page.

Having said that we generally use Out Of Holder (OOH) in the Pac NW (I am sure there are exceptions).

I think this is a little more descriptive, Tool Out Of Holder is pretty unambiguous, Tool Stickout, on the other hand, might prompt the question: Stick out of what?

We are definitely in the realm of picking fly dung out of peppercorns on this one, I think.

On 10/30/2023 at 12:37 PM, MrFish said:

Try running a 13 tooth endmill in Ti6al4V on a HAAS !!!

Or anything but a pretty open OUTSIDE profile on any machine.

On 8/21/2023 at 6:04 AM, Corey Hampshire said:

Any feedback on how much performance difference there is between the same generations of i7 and i9?

I have 2 HP laptops.

One is an i7 and one is an i9.

The i7 is used on my main work station laptop and is set up with max RAM and the most expensive Quadro card I could afford (5000).

It smokes the i9 machine with an Quadro 2000 card.

The i7 CPU allowed me to distribute my RAM evenly over my DIMs, really helps with temp. control.

12 minutes ago, Manofwar said:

Something else, be very careful making threads in this material.

 

Holes are nothing but misery generally, and Titanium is no exception here.

MolyD mixed with Copperease is one of the best tapping fluids I have used for Ti.

In the hard metal shops I have worked in, generally anything more than 3/8" diameter and I am looking at a threadmill option.

Also true for the nasty stainless steels.

Titanium (6Al4V) is pretty straight forward if you use good machining practices.

It is both hard AND tough.

It is (like Aluminum) a heat resistant material. That is, it does not conduct heat well.

As rigid a set up as you can manage. Both with your tools (short as possible) and fixturing / tooling.

I leave a fair amount of stock (obviously it depends on the cutter you are using), with a .5 -.75 inch solid carbide, and pretty much any insert cutter I can think of, I am leaving 0.02" stock to finish. If you are only leaving 0.01 with inserts, you are probably in trouble already.

Keep you chip load as high as you can to get the heat into the chip, more stock helps here.

Smaller parts are fine in a 40T machine, but once you get up much above 12" you will certainly wish you had a 50T.

22 hours ago, Doug Funny said:

I would like the post to output the M code with the angle on it's own line.

It looks like the A output is being forced, that's normally not the default condition for Mpmaster.

The OFF is a coolant conflict.

We will probably need a Zip2go or at least a post file.

16 hours ago, Candicane said:

when creating a solid model in 2021 is it possible to somehow create a tapped hole in your model showing the threads?

As Cementhead points out, yes, it is possible.

Be aware however that threads add a lot of relative weight to the solid. Fine if you have one or 2 but a bunch might slow you down.

On 8/23/2022 at 2:26 PM, crazy^millman said:

I have that on my RMB.

Sorry Ron but I am going to blatantly crib that one, nice.

Just now, honeybunches said:

All boards just say "Seiki"

Seiki just means precision, that's why you see it so often

6 hours ago, honeybunches said:

really curious if you guys have found your 'happy' with MC in lathe stuff?

I have modified several posts for single spindle/single turret Y axis full 4 axis, and for twin spindle.

All machines were post and go.

Once you add a turret it gets more complicated. There are experienced lathe guys out there who run twin turrets with MP posts, but I am really a mill guy, so I would probably go with the new "machining environment" system if I had to handle one of these.

I noticed you other post referring to your frustration with your post provider. This is not unusual and is what prompted me to learn post editing.

1 hour ago, Bill Craven said:

There are other considerations:

Hence the need to do a cost analysis.

Any hard metal part bigger than 9 or 12 inches would almost certainly be more cost effective than solid carbide.

And yes, using all the flute length in solid carbide can get you some easily bough MMR, But I have machined Titanium with inserts at .013 chipload and 16-18 cubes (45 HP dual winding spindle motor).

Good luck with solid carbide.

1 hour ago, AMCNitro said:

IF you ruin an indexable you're not out of pocket for just the inserts...

True, but if you crash a solid carbide tool you are out a big chunk of carbide.

Inserts are generally used for larger sizes, with good quality 3/4 inch (probably in the lower diameter range for insert substitution) standard length carbide tools running $250 - 300, it might not be as lopsided as you might think.

Always best to do a quick cost analysis. Not forgetting the cost of the regrinds of course.

All things being equal, inserts are cheaper.

Even if you pull solid carbide before you get any chipping there is a limit to the number of regrinds you will get. Then you throw away a sizeable (relative) chunk of carbide.

With inserts you don't throw away so much, and you get several (at least) new edges before you throw it away.

1 hour ago, Jespertech said:

I'm looking for more of an honest review from a hands on perspective. Which, in my experience, this site is the best for. 

The only 2 cents worth of advice that I can give, as I have no direct hands on experience with CMM programming, is that all the best CMM programmers I know up here in airplane country use pc-dimus.

22 hours ago, Jespertech said:

My question is has anyone here used Polyworks and can offer some pros and cons that they have found? 

Have you tried the CMM forums?

12 hours ago, pete_hull said:

the 'preamble' to all CAD/CAM that followed

Yep, I learned programming on an APT system.

Unbounded geometry, you just can't beat it.

3 plane lock, for a long time (if not still) this was the most accurate way to machine a surface.

If I had my druthers, I would run NCL. But I would never advise anybody to install it in their shop. NOT user friendly and good NCL programmers command very high salaries and are as rare as rocking horse manure.

As Pete says, all the so called "multiaxis kernels" are simply a GUI interpretation of the original APT vector matrix. 

18 hours ago, q4stix said:

I assume there are other machines that this style of code was needed

That was our observation concerning the two parameters we didn't end up using, including the one that was loaded in the machine when we started.

I couldn't imagine what they might be used for, but then again, I was concerned about the job in hand. It was the first time Multi-axis paths had been tried on any 4 axis machine in the shop.

On 8/11/2022 at 6:24 PM, q4stix said:

Any help is much appreciated!

The only time I've seen this it was a machine parameter on an Hitachi Seiki horizontal. The machine would break the motion rotate 360ish and pick up again.

There were 3 options in the machine parameters, all indecipherable in translation, so we just tried each one and found the one that gave us what we wanted.

There is a switch in the CD and also in the post at the top (not all posts).

My only 2 cents addition would be that Mastercam is RAM (and cache) hungry. I got more or less the same system on my HP lappy with 128G of RAM. RAM is pretty cheap these days.

I actually got the latest gen i7 as this allowed 4 x 32G DIMS for heat control. It's a great tool.

2 hours ago, tsdunen71 said:

Thanks for any help

Nowhere near enough information.

Which Generic post? 3,4 or 5 axis?

Give an example of what you have and what you want in code.

A copy of the post if you have made any changes would also help.

I assume when you say Text you mean comments, which ones do you want to modify: tool comments (?), operation comments?

4 hours ago, [email protected] said:

He said he felt that the tool was building up too much heat while spotting which definitely seems like a valid point.

If you notice on spot and center drills there is no back relief, hence the heat buildup.

You can get good quality cobalt drills with a split 135 degree point which don't require spotting. We do short run stuff here too; however, I will often use them just to capture the tip of a long drill (small spot) where I can't pilot drill for one reason or another

I have always liked the old school Sandvik facemills with the 4 cornered inserts for hard(er) metals. Not the 8 cornered (using both sides).