Thanks John. Nothing like getting one-up on one of my know-it-all associates. Heh-heh

If this question came up before, I'm afraid I can't find a solution here: Is there a method to dimension angles greater than 180° in MCAM 9.1 or X? I'd like to dimension hole positions all the way around circular fixtures, but the method escapes me.

I'd suggest Moly-Dee tapping fluid, too. Messy as hell, but saves about 5HP. YMMV

quote: I don't lose graphics in "other" CAD/CAM programs ONLY Mastercam. Sorry, this makes it a Mastercam issue, not a Vista issue. I concur. I've used a bunch of other CAD software, from AutoCAD, SW, UGNX, Pro-E, etc., and none is as graphically picky as MCAM. Our PCs are provided by GE, and in their infinite wisdom the installed graphics cards always stumble when using MCAM. I've had to cry, b!tch, moan and plead to get our IT department to replace the "stock" cards with ones more compatible with MCAM. As a cost-saving measure we're using Quadro FX1500s in our GE-provided, HP8400 workstations running XP.

Thanks, guys. I figured I'd have to use the X3 install disk, but I just HATE to have to go to IT and retrieve it. Those pipples have such a snobbish air about them, the hair on my neck stands up. Alas, this year we don't have any interns to do the gopher work. Maybe I can sneak in on Saturday and glom onto the disk. I did try the Your Installer program, but it balked, saying something about requiring 'setup.exe' to run properly.

Our not-so-illustrious IT department partitioned our hard drives with a 30GB C: drive and a bazillion GB D They always install software using the defaults during setup, meaning everything goes into the C partition, and now things are filling up. I got my hands on the X4 installation and installed it on the D Drive because there was so little space left, and I'd like to uninstall X3 to gain some of that back too. Problem is, there's no "Remove" button in Add/Remove Programs to do that. (Actually, X4 doesn't have that button either.) There's no provision from the start menu, or an uninstall file in the X3 folder that would remove it, so what are we to do? Delete the X3 folder and hope for the best? Any thoughts?

Update: After 2-½ months, our IT Dept finally gave me my FX 1300 card back from the old machine and I installed it in this new one. Of course, I had to wait 6 hours for one of the idjits to stroll by and grant me admin rights so I could reinstall the drivers. Now MC9 works like it used to. It's twue: that NVS 285 card is poopie-kaka.

Still running v9.1/SP2 here, and I experienced a completely blank screen yesterday after using F2 to unzoom a portion of the display. Total freakout. Screen Stats showed oodles of entities, Level Manager reported that there was stuff there, and I didn't hit Blank Everything accidentally. I saved the file anyway and exiting and restarted MC to no avail. I rebooted the machine and started MC and still no show. So, I hit F9 to display the origin lines and started zooming in on the intersection of the axes. After about 4 F1s, I got a tiny visible dot... several more zooms and my screen was visible again. What would cause the screen to zoom out to Pluto like this, and raise my BP to over 200? I can do without these late afternoon adrenaline rushes. Sheesh!

HEAVY SIGH... First of all, the video card is a Quadro NVS 285, but all the settings are either greyed out or non-functional, thanks to the idjit 'working' in our IT department. Our new owner - General Electric - has mandated that our PCs be set up so that individual users have no administrator rights. It's a "Run what I brung ya and shut up" kind of situation now. Driver updates and stuff is a thing of the past for now. Now... anybody know how to hack the administrator login? Just kidding, sorta. Thanks to all who chipped in in a losing battle.

My computer recently died and our 'ill'ustrious IT department set me up with a new Dell Precision 390, installing Mastercam 9.1 and Unigraphics. In Mastercam, the axes icons only appear while zooming in or out using the PageUp or Down keys, flickering when the key is pressed. In addition, the print preview outline does not appear prior to plotting. This is important to see if the displayed screen will fit within the boundaries of our plot paper. Anybody have any idea if there's a setting to turn these things on?

quote: Uh, just out of curiosity.....you haven't been out mushroom hunting lately, have you? See the pretty blue mushroom...

Another head-shaker: Has anyone experienced color changes when opening a file in X or X2? Files that I created in v9 are dimensioned in green #10, but when opened in X or X2 are displayed in red #12. They eventually return to green, but without any urging from me. If you stare at the screen long enough... - *POOF* - green they is.

OK - this bugged me to no end the past few days, so I came in early this morning to try and figure this out, and hooked up my trusty Epson 800 printer to the PC and got a 'normal' printout. Upon further investigation, I learned that one of our wannabe tech wizards (AKA: IT dept) replaced the printer drivers for the HP2500. Apparently, latest ain't always the greatest. I replaced the drivers with the 'old' ones and all was well again. I would like to kill, crush, and pulverize the IT Dept into oblivion, but I think that may be wrong. My thanks to Steve and Todd for their interest and replies. Excuse me while I go take a nap now.

Steve, Yes, I have a series of operation sheet borders lined up and I zoom in on each one to print to B-size paper. I'll give that a try. What bothers us is where those lines come from in the first place. I remember some time ago that the Drag function used to leave stuff that you couldn't see, but printed. As General Halftrack is wont to say: "Now what?"

Our version 9.1 SP2 has been printing extra lines that aren't visible on screen to an HP2500C printer of late. These lines generally go the full length of the paper. I fixed this once by Xform - Translating the page to another area of the screen, but even that isn't working anymore. Any ideas?

quote: Usually saving as STL straight out of Solidworks does the trick. But yesterday I had a part that gave me the watertight error. What finally worked was to save as a Parasolid (.x_t) from Solidworks, them load it back into Solidworks. From there I saved as an STL with the Options set to Binary (not ASCII) and the tolerance and angle set to the finest settings. I also used the output coordinate system created in Solidworks. I can attest that the above procedure works when using a model created in Unigraphics. I made a v16 Parasolid of the part, opened my UG seed part in UGNX4, and imported the parasolid. I exported the file to an .stl and opened that file in Mastercam 9.1-SP2. Worked just peachy, thank you.

Thanks for the tip, Peter. I passed the link to Harvey on to our milling guru for his opinion.

Rakesh~ The holes are already made using a Ø-.0625 end mill. The part is machined as a ring in a fixture, locating on the ID. It is segmented into 12 pieces during the same operation. The chamfers are on the ID side of the part. (Silly me, of course they are. You looked at the drawing!) One idea we've had was to gang the segments in another fixture, ID-side up, and chamfer them with whatever we can find. You can email me any information you have using the address in my profile. I don't think I've ever seen anyone's mail address displayed in the forum. Thanks for your help, all of you.

I just upped a revised drawing of the model with the chamfers applied entitled 2050M82-G03_OP100-PART.

I just uploaded an MC9 file to the MC9 folder entitled 2050M82-G03_OP70-PART.MC9 in an effort to gain some assistance in chamfering the square holes going through the part. The customer wants .020 +/- .005 chamfers applied to the ID side of the holes. The holes are .3864 on a side with .032 radii in the corners. I recall one of my former associates mention a tool that milled square holes and other polygons some years ago, but all I remember was that it MAY have been called a Wobble-Mill. A Google turned up a single hit that I didn't feel comfortable opening. (Let's say it was Brokeback and leave it at that) If I had an idea of what the tool looked like I may be able to develop a fixture to hold these parts for machining. Has anyone heard of such a tool, or lacking that, know of a method that can chamfer these parts?

Alan, See my post from 3 Sep: MCAM Printing linky

I paid a visit to one of our outside service shops to discuss some changes to a fixture I sent them, and the design engineer wanted to show off his new version X. After the obligatory oohs & ahs, I asked if I could have a printout of his display to show to our programmers. He looked kinda dismayed and said that he hasn't figured out some printing problems yet. Sending the file to their Epson 1520 (I think) rendered a black background. I asked if they had stock in Epson's ink factories. He said he couldn't get the printer to stop printing the black background, plus the resolution was really crappy. It reminded me of the "jaggies" graphics that were common in the '80s. I suggested trying another printer, and he said one of his associates hooked up an Epson 870 from the front office to it with the same results. I noticed there's no "Plot" command as in 9, so it seems that X doesn't play well with Windows drivers. Anyone else having an issue with this?

quote: Some people mistake SP2 for 9.2... Tha's right. We re-installed MCAM on our new workstations and had some confusion about 9.1 and SP2, and the various versions of updates we had to employ. Had a minor brain freeze there for a minute. It's v9.1 w/SP-2.

All our engineering workstations (7) here have MCAM 9.2 and UGNX v1 & v2 running side-by-side with no glitches. I often have both running at the same time with no problemos.

We don't have much luck using a Spaceball with MasterCam. It's indispensable in UGNX, but the screen blanks when atempting to use it in MC. Some guys here in the office claim it doesn't work at all.