lol....thanks for the laughs =P but wow....84 views and only one said EDM =P No sadly... =( I did some testing with carbide tools... I find it funny the hss spot drill actually lasted all the holes i test drilled. Anyway managed to get 20 good holes out of a carbide drill at 30SFM and 1.5IPM, but it managed to drill 53 holes with a chipped tooth.... go figure. I wonder if its because of the drill hitting the aluminum jaws that we used to hold the part with. The drill breaks at 50 SFM. Milling @ 60-80SFM. Facing with inserted facemills @ 200SFM. pretty much gotta go slow with this. I've had a few people at work asking me whether to try an OSG drill on these.... i dunno if i'm willing to risk that because of the 30 SFM on the carbide drill. /shrug....

i'm working with "CHROME, Cr, 99.95% PURE" Chromium - no alloy mixture of any kind. We need to put a 30deg chamfer on one side and there could be some milling, but overall we need to put a .22 thru hole with a .34 x .25dp c-bore. Material is .375 thick. Going to be drilling 36 holes... So...recommendations? Boss is thinking 2 carbide drills would be enough but I don't quite think so. I do know that the only thing we've done on this material in the past is facing them to thickness very slowly with a 6" facemill, but the rest with drilling and milling is new to us. I've considered running this @ Chromium Carbide cutting feeds/speeds using only carbide tools. Any advice would be appreciated! -JD

I'd be all over this, but I have zero multi axis experience and i'm hoping to get that sort of experience with my current company and grow from it. I'm mostly intertested in settling down from machining and just do programming. Best of luck Bob!

I noticed that too. We however can't keep all files in one directory since we have millions of files on the servers spread across 5 main folders for alphabetical, numerical, customer, (our company) and standards, plus a temp folder, so =\

I'll check the video out at home.... my company blocks a huge handful of websites.... including youtube >.<

I'm not sure how to word this but in the machine parameters section under tool path directory, how do you get mastercam to automatically save it to the correct directory instead of a set location? Say if you set your location to C:\ and you want your tool path to show up in the folder you are actually working from and not at C:\ then having to navigate to post it to the right folder, isn't there a setting somewhere so mastercam automatically saves it in its proper place instead of a specific spot? We have multiple folders saved on a server and within that has multiple folders within it for organization of programs based on the drawing names, so.... i was racking my mind on friday trying to figure this out.... any suggestions? -JD

Jim, what did he find out? I kinda figure it might be low gearbox/transmission oil?

Have you updated HASP with a new "maintenance code"?

DOH! thanks. @ Justin, if you really wanted to accurately calibrate the probe so you won't have to back off your G54 Z offset and get good results, use an endmill that is already measured, touch off with the endmill, but don't forget to add/subtract the difference to the Z offset based on your tool length. Then use the touch probe and measure the same spot and note the difference. You can adjust your work probe length to accomodate any difference between the tools and the work probe. This is one way of going at it. I'm sure others have alternate methods.

Quite alright, Justin =P And @ lifetimewarranty... every 6 months? jeez.... Seems i forgot to keep track of this thread and didnt realize i needed to check it till now. Thx for the replies. @ Crazy^Millman, sure, carbon steel, sounds like a plan there, till it wears out in a month ;-) Unless you actually mean some sort of very strong Tool Steel... But seriously, ceramic? I thought ceramic chips more so than carbide would? -JD

For those with a HAAS ( BLEH ) ... yea I know... they're "OK" ... but I was wondering how in the world could a carbide disc on the tool probe get worn out after 1-2 years of constant probing? I mean we have to constantly replace that little disc and I was wondering if there are alternate options where the material won't wear out as bad as carbide? I have a .007 dip in the center of the disc and when i calibrated it 2 weeks ago, it was a tricky situation trying to find a decent flat surface to use. We have mazaks that never have this problem at all. The haas is a head scratcher in this department and its a VF-6 at that.

Regarding the CIMCO communications setup, what are the proper settings to use? Theres a TON of more features outside of the standard mastercam v9 settings for communications.... As an example: in v9 for the mazak v655/60 ASCII Data ports: 7 Stop ports: 1 handshaking: software EOL Delay: 0.0 Baud rate: 4800 Strip carriage returns Strip line feeds Display screen something to this extent........ But my issue is that.... what are the rest of the settings on other tabs within CIMCO? @Jay: I've sent the mastercam dealer an e-mail about this, and i've tried the standard settings and the machine doesn't like the way it communicates. I don't know what to say... =\

I guess i shouldn't have gotten my hopes up... so its another Core 2 Duo @ 3.00GHz with 6 gigs ram and an AMD Fire PRO v3900 /facepalm

We have a VF-6 at the company and we use mastercam for everything, with the exception of cutting the jaws. With that said, we use geometry as probing tools with the presetter puts the tool diameter into geometry. If you are using mastercam to program your stuff, you dont need any tool dia number in geometry unless you are wanting to increase or decrease the size of whatever you're making. But i don't use diameter probing at all. Even the carbide disc itself gets worn out in 6 months- a year; u'll have a dimple in the center from all the probing of drills. there is a setting somewhere that can change it from diameter to radius... i think

Are the videos adequately subtitled for the deaf/ hard of hearing? I ask because I am. I haven't tried using videos to learn from. When i started programming 2 or 3 years ago, i took the X2 book home and learned off that. I had the demo learning CD from X4 and it was a bit of a challenge trying to find where everything was at but i appreciated it more due to finding mistakes of my own and knowing what feature does what. Did one-2 chapters a night and messed around with it some. For someone who'se never used mastercam before, i picked it quite fast and in less than a month, i was making programs with ease. I suppose everyone learns differently and being a machinist, it gave me a better understanding on how things would actually be setup (programming and machining) before giving the guys a program they didn't like, picky picky.

We are currently using mastercam v9 for communications between the two mazaks we have and in the past we've tried using X6's communications to send/receive code files to and from the machines and X6 did not work as good as v9's. As an alternative, is there any way we can make it work or is there any 3rd party programs for transferring data instead of using mastercam?

Not sure. I'll be seeing the system tomorrow....sigh. Another one will be needed at the same specs or greater. Well, a bigger monitor sure defeats having your face just inches away from the smaller monitor. Ya coulda quoted safety issues ;-) Anyway, my boss needs to fight the upper guys for a 2nd machine because we have 2 programming spots and I hold one of them. However i'm a CNC Machinist 1st and CNC Programmer 2nd so i do both at the same time. Something i need to ask: Is there a huge difference between level 1, 2, and 3? Our supervisor used a level 1 fob to test out the new system, but i'm on level 2 and the other guy is using level 3. We actually have a CNC Laser and i'm wondering if medicore performance might be a bigger issue with a level 3 than a level 1 and he pretty much uses parasolid models made by engineering.

No worries about the cost, I can imagine your system is well over $2500. I've less than that much on a gaming rig @ home and built it myself. Believe me, I would love nothing more than to build it myself, but we cant have an independent OS as everythings on WIN 7 Enterprise... From what I know, i'm hoping to get the new machine back today, so i'll keep everyone here updated on the specs. Where can I download that benchmark program at? And... @ crazy millman, we program for 5-6 CNC machines: 1 Mazak horizontal, 1 Mazak vertical, 1 HAAS VF-6, 2 boring mills (Kuraki). We sometimes program for the other smaller kuraki and that's pretty much it, as they have their own cell to worry about. Overall we have 12 total CNC mills + lathes ( 4 being CNC lathes including a Mazak multiplex), but the lathe guys do their own programming with mazatrol.

I realize some or all of you who read this will LOL, but gotta ask since upper management is asking: Lemme start by explaining how the desktop PC finally died and it couldn't handle X7 (we were still running X6 and still are) . 1: So we needed a new machine and the big boss wanted to know if there is a way to improve X7's performance by disabling features that are not needed or something like that... Bear with me here... my first thought is LOL and wtf is he thinking... 2: That being said, my next question is what is the low end hardware requirements, this is in your own opinions and not what is shown on mastercam website. I really want to say to go high end for X7 and future versions so the PC can last a while, but such is the case with my company... (budgets). So, i'm looking forward to the comments lol... -JD

Thx for the welcome. We tried contacting the reseller, and we actually ended up causing them to scratch their heads and look at us as if we have a 2nd head growing somewhere.... was pretty much how things went. Looks like i get to have some fun experimenting with the control files... wish me luck!

@ Workmantm: I think it looked like TiCN coated, I can't be sure (I wasn't the operator). Coolant flow was good, i mean it was a thru coolant drill. As for Interpolating the holes + reaming, that is something we don't want to do. @ Jeff: Its 99% pure aluminum GRADE 1350

I'm wondering if the Kuraki's, Mazaks and HAAS allow for full 360 degree arcs, Our issue might be different, but i felt my question might be appropriate in this thread since it is about arcs. We're having a dual issue: #1: When one of the programmers at our company change the start point of an arc chain, the machine alarms out on all the machines we have when we need to comp out a hole. However, i've been taught to rotate the arc's starting point to where you want it to be and use that endpoint to start/stop on the chain. If there is a setting within the control file that is causing this to happen, maybe we can fix that, otherwise why is there a move start point on the chains? #2: On machining full arcs, I've experimented an issue we've been having: The machines have been doing an extra loop after machining an arc, but that extra loop was controlled by the overlap. As an example, if there is no overlap, the cutter leads in and leads out like it should as back plotted in mastercam. With a .01 overlap, there is a linear motion on a 6" arc as an overlap. With a .02 Overlap, there is an extra loop for some odd reason once the cutter finishes machining the arc. With a .03 overlap, the cutter behaves like it should as seen in backplot. Heck, backplot shows no extra loop on all test runs, so i'm wondering if this is a control thing?

Hi, we've been trying to cut down machining time on our products and most experiments have failed. Parts are being ran on a Mazak Horizontal and taking ~45mins to do a complete set on a tombstone. The holes are a M6x1.0 and we've tried a coolant thru carbide drill but the drill broke on the 2nd hole. I'm wondering if there should be pecking because of the material, but the mfr is telling us not to peck... Any suggestions?