I like Asus and Abit although the P4 I built 2 years ago is on an Intel 850 board.

If you know how to build yourself, you can do very well buying components over pricewatch.com

I was dual booting Mandrake 8.0 with Win XP Pro. Mandrake was installed after Win98 SE on primary, Win XP Pro. That setup was dual booting nicely before installing Mandrake. After installing Mandrake, LILO gave you the choice of Linux or Windows, choose Windows, you got the dual boot option for 98 or XP Pro. All worked well until removing Mandrake, then XP needed repair install to work again. I plan to use Redhat as UG and Pro E support it when I set up for Linux again

I was able to get my company to switch to Mastercam from Surfcam and got the maintenance agreement. As times are tight now and Ver X is coming out sometime, I am glad I do not have to fight them to purchase the upgrade. If you can still get maintenance on Ver 9, push hard because X from what these guys on forum say is a worthy upgrade.

Check into FMMT through emastercam.com and or mastercam resellers

Nice tip Thad, I use Explorer extensively for file management. Seems like a good way to set up auxillary shortcuts for separate locations

Northern CT is $2.07/gal for super at Mobil stations

I have sent the following to Deb Leh; Dear Board Members, My name is Jim Smith and I work for an aircraft turbine manufacturer as a process engineer. I am writing on behalf of one of your technology students, Paul Vanek. It is my understanding that the technology department is being considered for downsizing. As a machinist/CAM programmer, I would hate to see this happen. One can earn a fine living for themselves and their family from the training they receive from a scholastic program. I was fortunate enough to attend the Southwick High school machine Shop program in Southwick MA from 1974 - 1978. It was an optional four class program that offered training on machine tools such as lathes, horizontal and vertical milling machines, radial arm and standard drill presses, surface grinders, tool grinders, saws, and a full range of inspection equipment. The class prepared many of its students for rewarding and exciting careers in the field of manufacturing. Many of us are still in the field and some have furthered their education and have become accomplished design and manufacturing engineers. Others have stayed in the field as toolmakers and mold machinists, have become foremen, supervisors, and even machine shop owners. I have spent over 25 years as toolmaker, have had my own shop on a part time basis for over 8 years, and am about to receive an associates degree in mechanical engineering. I would not be where I am today without the training I received in high school machine shop. Even today, with all the CNC machinery, it is imperative to teach the basic machining principle as they are the foundation of all things manufactured. As an educator, you must do your part to keep manufacturing thriving in the United States. For those with a sense of history, consider the state of nation at the start of World War II. The nation was at the end of an economy crippling depression. We were dragged into war with a dormant manufacturing sector. Within 2 years, manufacturing facilities were converted to military production and we had the best equipped military by the end of the war. We became the greatest world power on our capabilities to design and manufacture. If we allow the training programs in our schools to be downgraded, so will the manufacturing industry. Please take into consideration the full impact of downsizing your technology department. Sincerely Jim Smith

Not quite yet, but still frustrating to edit a 100k program into 4 chunks to do small amount of 3d work. Thankfully this won't come from my wallet but the owner up until recently preferred to take the money for repairs and upgrades to put downpayments on Haas leases

Thanks Millman, I took contact info for William Timms and will contact this coming week

I would think if the control cannot run program from tape that BTR would not work. I used to own an old BPT Series 2 NC that BTR worked very well on because machine only read tape( no storage). The machine circuitry only allows program exec from buffer and additional hardware from Okuma is needed to activate factory DNC options that were available in 1985

At least when I checked there were no bids on it...yet. How much can I get for my original box for Mastercam Draft 9.0 SP1? LOL

Perhaps considered O/T as not a Mastercam question, I program, setup, and operate an older Okuma 5VA with OSP5000M-G control. I currently create 3d programs for it that greatly exceed the capacity of machine, 30kb. We load programs via RS232 port, but cannot drip feed as machine does not have abilty to run program from tape, so for this reason I feel solution is not as simple as BTR. Machine with optional Okuma hardware would open up 3 levels of DNC communications, but dealer is unsure of availabilty of hardware. I push the owner to maintain these machines as my projects are inconel 718 and the 2 Okumas we have are old, but very rugged compared to the Haas VF3s and VF5 they are surrounded by. I need to know if there are any cost effective means of upgrading communications on these machines. Thank you

In-House and the forum are vauable assets to those of us who use mastercam and all who desire to know more about this great software. Happy Birthday and Thank you

Aha, proper cam instruction is priceless.

I can vouch for the knowlegeable staff at Sevices for Automation. They are our MC reseller and Steve answered my questions very well.

I just tried twice, they seem unavailable at moment. I checked yesterday, they had old schedule up and mostly unassigned classes

Mill book mentioned is $45 US,my bad, gave you Canadian

Adam, the training at macdac is free to you and not subject to approval from workman compensation. Also at the end of the class(es) Macdac provides you with a certificate of completion. I recommend getting the Mill book from this website($65)and taking the class at Macdac as soon as one is available for you. The problem with learning on your own to start is that you tend to reinforce bad habits that are hard to break down the line. Macdac will get you off to an excellent start that you can expand on your own with the book and Mastercam Demo. I had purchased a seat of Mastercam Draft to be able to save drawings to bring into Demo. I had checked into an educational seat of Mastercam and ended up with the Draft seat. As far as what Macdac can do, call them and ask.

Hi Adam, Seeing you are from Gardner Ma and that you are an unemployed CNC operator you qualify for free Mastercam training from MACDAC Engineering with a branch office in Fitchburg. You can go to www.macdac.com for class schedule and further information. I was unemployed over a year ago and received valuable training from them.

Noel, I understand completely about not wanting to look back in a few years and say What If??? I started a similiar positon last fall. They wanted to change the world within, but when push came to shove, the owner says"Don't rock the boat". I saw this coming before I started and if it were not for completely miserable working conditions at previous employer, I would not have taken it. I plan to stick it out for as long as I can to get the experience designing EDM electrodes, something I could not do at last place.

Make sure you are using fanuc format drilling formats, not MX3 in the cam file or DNC file.

I have played with our Solids package on this project, made a surface model from the Parasolid original, made solid sheets of the intended trode areas. Unfortunatly, I do not have uninterupted work time at my shared workstation. I got temp pulled off the project for a hotter one so this one will be hot when I get back to it in a couple weeks.

I used to use a Trak AGE 3 until about 2 years ago. I am referencing my TRAK manuals. If you are trying to load a .cam file over the wire, I believe the file size has to be small enough to be stored on the floppie. If not, then the file should be renamed to .dnc so it can be dripped. I also see that there are separate settings for cam RS232 and DNC. CAM transfer is restricted to 4800 baud and DNC (service code 37) is selectable from 2400 to 19200. This may be the problem you are having. You can also from command prompt(dos world)type: MODE COM1:4800,e,7,1 and press. Then to bypass Spectrum typ:COPY COM1:FILENAME.cam Make sure that "COM1" is set to the actual com port #used in above settings

I think I need to clarify that I am trying to generate the geometry for the electrode from the part model. I have no problems achieving desired results after creating electrode model