We have used Mastercam & Cadkey here for over 10 years. There are strengths in Cadkey as a design package, but in the past three years, I have been in the position of checking all designs using MC Design before it goes out to the mills. The past two years I have also done design of our injection molds. Most of our data is supplied in Iges from customers and over 75% are not complete in Cadkey, but are in MC. I also feel that there are features that MC is missing as a design package. However, I am also the person that visits the Cadkey forum for feedback on problems. We have experienced the same things as most forum subjects report in Cadkey, Files corrupted ( empty ), memory and stability problems. Our Cadkey guy has lost many weeks of work the past 2 years. As much as we discuss features and speed, reliability is our first priority. To date, all of our solids have been designed in Cadkey, and ALL of these jobs had to be redone in MC before being passed on to the Mill 3. After 10 years of using both inhouse, we find that when something is too involved in 3D for Cadkey, it comes to MC to make it work. For us, Cadkey makes the pictures for the customer, Mastercam makes the real tool.

We have 5 mill seats on the shop floor, one for each CNC. Each operator is his own programmer and programs while the previous toolpath is running. They know which tools are available and each has his favourite sequences. There is no toolpath tryout or dry run or documenting. This suits us because we make plastics molds and each one is different. There is no archiving of programs or associated paperwork. We only keeep the data of the mold, and any electrodes used. I can't imagine having only button pushers on one of a kind jobs, you need people who have to care about what they do and they will apply themselves if given the chance. You can also quickly weed out the people who don't care about their future or the well being of the company by giving them responsibility.

When you create a surf with flat boundary, you can pick the outside chain first, then any inside chain and it will create the surface accordingly. You can pick as many inside chains as you want. You can also use create, surf, next menu, primsol to create quick boxes, spheres etc.

I agree that htis forum is getting well used and it may be time to catagorize it, but its useful to see other areas because a problem or solution in one may be useful in another. I must say that I'm glad this forum has not gone the way of the Cadkey site ( we have Cadkey as well). Just people with questions getting help from others with answers! The rapport on this forum should be an example of how a forum should be used.

Reminds me of my experience with Ver 7.0. After about 3 months, I noticed that a large file saved very fast and when it was opened, I only had the features that were on screen at the time. Apparently I was the first to report this, but not the last. It may be useful to know your OS for the rest of us. Are there problems in NT. Win98 or Win2000?

Tilt the block up at 15 or 30°, cut the areas you need. This would be less time consuming than projecting splines and cutting to contours. If you do this alot, make or setup a tilting vise with a known pivot point and use that point as your Z plane datum, then you won't have to reset your tools or reference point. If your blocks are steel, rough out on a vise, and finish on a magnetic sine chuck.

I run Win98, 256 ram, p3-450 and have no noticeable slowdowns with 2 Mastercam sessions. Checking the allocations is the thing to do. Allow room for the OS to run (32 MB ) and set the total in MCam to less than half of the remainder. If you need to run other stuff at the same time, you will need to drop the allocations or get more RAM.

It sounds like Windows is not finished loading. Check swapfile space available. Also see if there is an app loading in startup that may affect your display and freezes any desktop udating from happening. I also use TweakUI and it works well on Win 95 & 98.

We've used Logitech for many years on all 5 seats of Mastercam, and never had a mouse problem. Insread of the latest drivers, try loading the Version 7 mouseware drivers. Just because marketing pushes the latest, it isn't always the best. We run 3 button Logitech on our Cadkey and office systems also. Win 95, Win 98, NT, no problems.

Heres another one for ATI Rage users, there is a patch for DirectX Ver 7.0 to Ver 7.0a. I could never update my ATI drivers and have Mastercam work properly until I uploaded the patch. I would have mouse, shade and printer problems if I attempted to use any Ati driver updates later than June 1999. Don't forget that most Rage updated drivers require DirectX Ver7.0. Go to /directX/setup/dxdiag to get the screen that tells you the version you have.

If IDEAS outputs a parasolid (*.x_t) use it instead. When setting any translator, set the output tolerance to to half of your system tolerance to assure a clean translation. The only problem I've had in the past from other systems, is when the operator is unaware of tolerance configurations. If the Iges is set to .005 mm but the entity creation is set to .01 mm, you will get mismatch. If you have control over the IDEAS system, check all entity creation as well as output tolerances.

If you do an ALT F1 (fit to screen) and your part is small or off centre, you may have small pieces of lines and arcs (usually construction data) visible. Try using Screen, Blank, Window and window the areas outside of your part. If ALT F1 works now, you will have to check that the source of the data is not outputting hidden (construction) data to a visible layer. Many of our suppiers do not go to the trouble of configuring their output (Iges) and I end up with a lot of garbage. Another way around this is to "Blank" all lines, arcs, splines, so there are only surfaces left, and use Create ,Curve, All Edges, All Surfaces to generate your own wireframe. Don't forget to use Modify, Convert to Arcs to reduce the splines to lines and arcs. Also, Delete Duplicates is handy.

I tried a Matrox G400 AGP, 32 mb, and found a 15% decrease in performance when I turn off multiple layers. Rendering and dynamic rotation are the same as my Rage 128. I have a 6 mb file I used as a benchmark. After turning on all layers, I rendered it, un-rendered, turn off all levels except one and waited for them to disappear. I timed each operation, and found no difference in rendering or the jerky effect with dynamic rotation. Removing or adding levels was slower on the Matrox. I also found that a Cadkey solid I had rendered incomplete with the Matrox, and an attempt to dynamically rotate the part froze my system.

Thanks for all the input on the video cards. Any experience out there on a multi-button mouse ( more than 3 buttons ) or the other two input devices?

Why would you have to print out NC code? If you have to do it, find an ASCII text editor that can handle large files. We use Editeur (shareware version available). It is fast and allows you to set printer fonts different from screen fonts. It also tracks edits..etc. You can also get shareware or freeware that allows for two column printing. The older type tractor feed is rare on bubblejet, but you would just have to set page length carefully.

From the main screen, "Screen" "configure" go to the "allocations" tab and set your database to 100000 (100 MB) and adjust your other settings to a value above the figure you are getting the error for. Don't forget that there are two screens to set up. One for inch and one for metric. Set both the same to avoid crashes if you need to switch between the two. If you do rendering to surface files, you can set the defaults in render to be different, depending on Inch or Metric configuration.

T-shirt and pad were recieved as promised. Thank-you!

Has anyone out there had experience with a Spaceball or Cyberpuck with Mastercam? Where can I get one (Barrie area)? I would also like feedback on a video card. I have an ATI Rage (32 meg) but the dynamic rotation is poor in rendered mode and if I use the latest drivers, wierd things happen like I can't print a hardcopy and have to set the system to 256 colours. This is real ugly on a 19" monitor.

The accuracy of tapping depth is related to how quickly your CNC can decelerate, and then reverse. Even with floating tap heads, you may find it takes 4 revs to do this. By this time, the Z axis is already going up, or you may have bottomed the tap. On our CNCs, we use 300 RPM max to prevent the tap from overfeeding(bottoming) into the hole and breaking. If the Z axis raises too early, you may just pull the tap from the holder. Try a tapping cycle beside a fixed pointer, and see how many revs it takes to reverse at a set speed. Unless you have a synchronized spindle/feed type, you may have to use the canned cycle with the dwell at the Z depth and stay short by the number of threads it overshoots for the RPM you use. We use 300 RPM all the time & program it 1 1/2 threads short.

Mastercam has an STL converter, but the results can be ugly. The other option is to import the STL into Cadkey (or whatever may be available), then export as Acis or parasolids. I have found that Parasolids is better than Acis and allows the converter to build wireframe as well as surfaces.

I've translated up to 50 MEG iges back at version 5. Presently I have a PIII 450 with 256 MB ram and a 50 meg file is translated at more than 10 meg per minute, as long as there are no errors. I just did 18.6 MB iges in 1:35 with a few errors. As I said before, all system components affect the performance.

After you position your first .000 , pick the features you know won't overlap. Select the .000 and move it out to where you want the next row of dim'ns. Use ordinate, existing and add your next column of dim'ns.

I find it annoying that in some selection commands, "window" is modal and in others it has to be selected each time. It's a minor thing, but can this be addressed in future versions. I do a lot of design and have not been able to create a macro to execute a shortcut to the create, surface, trim/extend, to curves (or flat boundary). Any ideas out there?

There was an interesting schematic in one of the computer mags just before the Athalon was out. It showed that 90% of the routines were faster in the Athalon but the toolpath and element analysis in CAD/CAM is very processor intensive. This schematic showed two additional processor paths that are accessed in the Intel chip. The only place these affected the test results, was in AutoCad acvanced routines. See if you can find someone with the same Intel equivalent chip and run some tests. Don't forget, a lower end motherboard can knock off 20% performance also. Hard drive prefomance, system cache, ram access, etc..etc.. all affects overall performance.

Try using an Intel chip. There are math sub routines that are accessed during calcs. These may not be in the Athalon. We've tried other chips in the past and found a 25% or more improvement with Intel. Also, stay away from Celeron for CAD/CAM use.