thanks. yes it is a big part . its fairly complex and im wittling about 80 % of the material away. once its done roughing I want to release the vices to see if it moves and then continue with the finishing.

i would like to use this operation to finish the part im making.i used high speed area rough to rough it all out leaving .03 on everything.it cut very nicely. this hs waterline looks great to finish everything but I cant get it to cut a large area on the floor. is there a way to get it to cut the floor too?

what is an "ice vice" anyone have a link or experience?

thanks....just getting back to this now. im looking for an indexable 1/4 inch.

ok I must be a real dummy... I downloaded it (for mc x9)on one computer and then transferred the file over to my standalone with mc on it. the file was quite large and took 10 min to download. I put the file on my desktop. now there is a file named verisurf on my desktop. the description says it is a "setup application" and I cant seem to open it or get it to run. I tried opening it with mc but I cant view anything. what am I doing wrong?

either im doing something wrong or im not sure what im doing at all.(probably the latter) I tried downloading it for x 9 but couldn't do it for some reason. any ideas?

I would like it to be indexable.i use Harvey now but as nice as they are they don't give me the life of an indexable gold coated insertmill.i have some but they are big diameter and I need to get in close to some walls.nine 9 makes a small one but its only a 60 deg included.

can a mc file be converted to a 3d pdf?

sorry to bring this up again but im still a little confused. if I have a solid that has a good clean surface on it that was created using arcs(to make the solid),will I need to drop the cut tol way down to get rid of faceting? the stepover is still very small so its not like it has to create facets because the stepover is too big. and its not like dropping this cut tol way down is going to add to the program or calculation time because the stepover is still dictating it. this happens now and then to me and I usually don't zoom into the verified part close enough to see the faceting until after I find it on the part.

100% face. I hate it from the center

I played around with it tonite a bit.i found that the surface is very clean and created using just arcs.(not faceted in the model) the stepover was .015 and the total tol was .005 with 100% in the cut tol field in the arc filter page. as I dropped the cut tol I could see the facets get closer together in verify.if I dropped it all the way down to .00005 (the max) it seemed to go awy and be very smooth.ill try it if I get the job again thanks!

although it is an arc surface, I chose to go in a long direction so the arc filter tol should have no effect.no arcs could be generated in that direction. ill try to make a similar example on mon and post it.

not that I could see.

sorry I cant share the file. it was a 2 inch radius in 4340 heat treated steel abou 30-35 rockwell.i roughed it first with a different tool leaving .02. I finished it with a 2 flute 1.25 inserted ball with fresh inserts.it was held very stubby and didn't run out at all. the surface finish from the tool was great but you could see a faceting "pattern" at about every 1/4 inch all the way around. I made surfaces from the solid on another level and drove the tool on the surface not the solid.maybe the surface itself was faceted .I didn't think of that.

I recently ran a very large job on a heavy pc of steel.it required some surfacing but the majority of it was a round cylinder that ran about 20 inches down the length of it.i surfaced the radius from both sides and felt it would be best to just run it lengthwise and have it shift y and z and then just make a long x move down the length.it looked fine on the screen and the toolpath looked great from any angle I zoomed in on it but it came out slightly faceted on the part itself.it was well within tolerance but you could clearly see the faceting at about every 1/4 inch or so.i set the tol on the surfacing page to .001 and the stepover was only about .01. what do you think caused this? should I have set the tol even lower? there was no sense moving the arc tol up higher because it was not doing arcs at all. im sure if I had gone the other direction and generated arcs in y z that it would be smooth because it couldn't get faceted within just an arc move.

I use Harvey mostly but once in a while you get a material or a heat treat that just leaves a burr no matter what.there is also nothing more unsightly then having to file a contoured edge on a nice part.sometimes I will run the finish tool again or sometimes ill rough then chamfer and then finish the od or id contour.

you are the man! that seemed to work great! I saw the roll function but did not know you could unroll in it too. I was looking all over to find an unroll function but it was right there all along. its also pretty amazing to see that this goes straight for about 2 inches then tapers way up and then straight again ,and all it needs to drive the toolpath is 3 slightly different angled lines in a chain. also the code is only 3 lines!

I recently engraved the laces on a baseball all around a sphere on a rotary in a haas vertical. I just took the lace geometry and projected it "normal" to the sphere surface and it followed it perfectly swapping y for a.wouldn't it work the same for this? I guess I could only view it as a ballmill in simulation though.

thanks, this is exactly what im tring to do. if it can only be done with the 5 axis option I will have to see about upgrading it today. the only way ive thought of cheating it would be to make a solid model wo the groove and then take the groove geometry(really just the spline down the center)and project it "normal" onto the solid or surface. then just drive to toolpath and swap the rotary for "y" in axis substitution.

if we upgraded to the 5 axis in mc would this be an easy task? could I drive the tool right don the solid or surface without creating additional geometry?

nope wont work in lathe c-axis toolpaths either.it prompts for a rotary diameter. funny how I just did a project by projecting some very complex geometry onto a sphere and it did it without a glitch running all over the entire sphere surface front to back but I cant get a simple contour to run straight down the center of a line along a contour in the x axis. in the end its just an x,z,a move.

yes it is varying. I think I can write the prog by hand now that I know the exact drop for each revolution. this just seems like it should be so simple to do in mc. I haven't tried it yet but I think if I switch the machine to lathe and program the toolpath as a c axis milling path it will easily do it and ill just have to switch all "c" moves to "a" moves.

sorry ....but do you mean the unroll that is in the contour parameters ? or do you mean somehow just unrolling the geometry by itself first and then applying the contour toolpath to it? this seems to me that it should be much easier than it is being.

I cant give it a rotary dia because it changes.

beautiful thanks. ive got a nice single spline going right down the center of the thread at the minor depth. now what toolpath would I use to drive a tool on it? ive tried contour 2d and 3d but cant get the part to spin ...the tool jusy stays straight up and down.