Hot Diggity Dog!!!

Felix, You have mail!

I believe it means "approximate"

Just a quick update. When i left work today, I had those new inserts I described going 480 IPM in mild steel with a 4" cutter at a .030" DOC. They were running beautifully and ripping all kinds of material off in a big hurry. And to make thing better, following the advice of this thread linky, I saved a boatload of rapid time. This forum not only makes me a better machinist, but a more efficient programmer! Thanks all!!!

Thanks all for the different ways to do this. Michael's idea was right on to what I was looking for. Works sweet. Thanks!

If I was to have a block of material that was 100" long x 3" tall x 5" deep and I need to turn it into a block that was 4" deep by facemilling 1" of stock off of it. Is there a way to make mastercam do a zig zag pattern on the face. Example. Using a 5" facemill, start at X-3, Y+0, Z+.75, feed to X+103, Z in to +.5, feed to X-3, Z in to +.25, feed to X+103, Z in to 0, then feed back to X-3. I have taken a line and tried chaining it and trying different toolpaths and for the life of me, cannot find a simple way to do this. Any suggestions would be appreciated

Thanks for the heads up gentlemen.

Just got word from our buyer that they don't stock the inserts we currently use on our indexable dovetail cutters, so I thought I'd ask you folks, what brand of indexable dovetail cutters do you use? When we change inserts in the ones we have now, they don't repeat very well. Is this a problem with the ones that you use? Thanks for any info.

Bruce, Some of our mandrel parts get nitrided. looksy It's usually 4140 ht, decarb free material, 28-32 Rc that this gets done to

Jeff, Just an FYI, Dapra came out with some new inserts to go in there toroid cutters. Instead of the RDCH-43-T inserts they are HFDCH-43-T inserts. I have been running in 4140ph, the RDCH inserts at about 900 sfpm @.012" chip load per tooth @ .060" DOC. Gonna try these out at 800 sfpm @.080" chip load per tooth @ .030" DOC as soon as I get something good to tear up.

brendan, look here HTH

Step = Standard for the exchange of product model data I'm still trying to hunt this issue down. I am thinking along the lines of fillets again. I can pull it in as surfaces and I am not familiar with surfaces at all. When I analyze it will allow me to change the color of the bad area's and for the life of me, I can't find those colors anywhere on my screen. quote: I know virtually nothing of Inventor 10 but I am familiar with ver 9 & Solidworks. The injuneer said 10 is pretty much like 9.

Steve, Had him export it to me as a .sat, still a no go. I've had the error before on .ipt's but it usually was a fillet or something which I would have him delete and then put it back on with MC once it was converted. This one has us stumped. I also didn't know what ACIS stood for and after doing a little hunting, came up with this: ACIS stands for Alan (Grayer), Charles (Lang), Ian's (Braid) System. They were the 3 people at Three-Space Ltd who initially wrote the solid modeler for Spatial Technology. There were no marketing people around and they had to call it something. Those 3 guys had a long history of writing modelers, all of which were named after figures in Greek or Roman mythology, so here's a bit to trivia that most people don't know; they picked the order of their initials in the name because they found this: Acis was the son of Faunus, in love with Galatea, a sea nymph. The cyclopean giant Polyphemus also loved Galatea, but she rejected his advances. Out of rage and jealousy, Polyphemus attacked Acis, and crushed him under a huge stone. Stricken with grief, Galatea returned for ever to the sea. However, the sea gods were moved by her sorrow, and caused Acis to be reincarnated as an ever-flowing river, whose waters would flow into the sea and mingle with her tears. Spatial never promoted this for the obvious that ACIS was killed by a big guy. As for .sat, it stands for "Save As Text" (it's ASCII), there's also .sab which stands for "Save As Binary". Again, no marketing people involved. Definitely some useless knowledge to know

Does anyone have experience trying to bring in an .ipt from inventor that was derived from an .iam? I get a too many parents error. Any suggestions on what to do? Will it work at all? The models are Inventor Series 10 (no SP yet) Mastercam 9.1 mr0105

Same thing last weekend, "permission denied". This happened on a Saturday and I went in and deleted the config file, reopend mastercam so it would create a new one, and all was well. Without us being admins, we still could not double click on a file and get it to open, even with going thru the registry and changing the directory path. WE also couldn't open files that we had previously created. She had to make us two out in the cam office local administrators for now (which she is not happy about). Hope it works out better for you this week then it did for me last week.

foolsh, Take a look at this thread web page and see if that helps, or maybe I am way off base and not functioning correctly thius morning.

foolsh, What problem are you having? Toolpath? Error? Etc. If it's a post issue, I probably won't be any help, but if it's not, I'll give it a try.

bpa, It started with this web page and ended with this web page

Look here web page

Here is chick's web page

Not sure about the 370, but on the later ones an M19 first to orient & then an M57 to lock the spindle. M58 unlocks the spindle. If that works, a simple program like this should get you the desired results. 0 BEGIN PGM GREG INCH 1 TOOL CALL 1 Z S0 2 L M19 3 L M57 4 FN 0: Q1 = +1.015 5 LBL 1 6 L X+0 Y-Q1 R0 F MAX 7 L Z+0.1 R0 F MAX 8 L Z-1 R0 F100 9 L Y+0 R0 F MAX 10 L Z+1 R0 F MAX 11 LBL 0 12 FN 1: Q1 = +Q1 + +0.01 13 FN 12: IF +Q1 LT +1.251 GOTO LBL 1 14 L Z+20 R0 F MAX 15 L M58 16 STOP 17 END PGM GREG INCH

Randy, screen > xform > scale. Scale the drawing from metric to inches

Just a quick update on this issue. Once we got the spindle all fixed and I was physically able to run the program on that machine again, it seems as though the 430 errored out on that line, but only after it ran that line. The 415's and 426's stopped at that line without running. The tool looked as though it was compensating from the id of the hole to the od of the hole. All in all, my post had a problem and the 430 controller also had a problem so error 1 + error 2 resulted in some broken sh$t. Again thanks all for the help and we will see what the fine folks at heidenhain have to say.

On dollar beer night too... Do my best to have one for everyone. Thanks and congrats

Dave, quote: Add a # in front (or delete) this line if the linear move is the cause of the problem: That was it!!! Only one of our posts had that not blocked out and low and behold, that's the machine it was posted for. Thanks a ton for helping me resolve the problem!!! Mayday, quote: this is what you get if you enable "retract before last move" on the exit side of leadin/leadout parm. notice the z move with comp active then linear move with comp shutting off, z retracted Thanks for teaching me! I didn't know. quote: ps. have you looked at an allied spade to blast those holes before you contour the bottom? We are lucky if we make one of these a year, so it wouldn't be feasible to me for this part, but I will definitely look into that tool for other things we do. Thanks! Dave, Mayday & Henk, Thanks to all of you for taking the time out of your day to look into this for me. A big thanks you to all