I think the only way to do it would be to put the geometry onto a seperate layer and then mask that layer. HTH. Neil.

If I understand your question properly all you need to do is create a solid the shape of your fixture, place your model in position and do a boolean remove. Neil.

Damn, I gotta learn to type faster!

Rick, I posted a file called wingneil.mc9 in the same folder. I converted your lines to splines to make it easier to pick and a smaller file too. Neil.

Rick, you are correct, coons is the appropirate surface creation type. What you need to do is break your leading and trailing edges where your across curves meet. Although the wing can be modeled as one complete surface, try doing one patch at a time (choose 1 across and 1 along). If you still need help I can send you the file with more detail. Neil.

I have UG NX4 installed if you'd like me to give it a try. Neil.

Hey Mike, you might want to try lowering your FIFO buffers on the port you're using (or even turning them off) if you haven't already done this. Go to your device manager, right click on the port, properties, Port Settings tab, advanced. Neil.

Hi, you might want to try turning down or turning off your FIFO transmit and receive buffers. We have to do this for most of our machines. In Windows, go to control panel, System, Hardware tab, device manager, ports, double click the port you are trying to use, port settings tab, Advanced.

Check to see if you have a surface that is 7.000 above the part that you are not aware of.

Thanks for your replies, maybe I should explain why I've posted this question. We are a tool and die shop that is currently in the process of moving from 2d Autocad designs to 3d UG solids designs. I've been using MC since version 3, somewhere around 14 ago. For the past 10 years I've been programming full time using only MC (and Cimkink before MC had a reliable multisurface tool) for toolpaths and surfacing. We have never had to send a job out because MC couldn't do the job. I find Mastercam to be very quick at processing large surfaced files and I can't imaging spending large sums of money to be have a system that processes 10% quicker. I have not done much in the way of machining plates (2d) from a solid model and was wondering how much time would be saved by machining it in UG vs MC. I realise this forum will tend to be a bit biased but from what I've read most folks here will tell you the way it is. I have spoken to Andrew in the past and will probably contact him again as well as In-House. Don't get me wrong, I love MC, it's simple yet powerful and it currently works for us, but if the right thing to do is make the switch than that's what we will do. Again, thanks for your comments. Neil.

Anybody out there ever use UG cam for machining? How does it compare to MC? Speed? Ease of use? Thanks for your input. Neil.

Jim, you might want to try turning open gl either on or off. In mastercam go to screen, configure, click on the screen tab, and pick "enable open gl drawing". Hope this helps. Neil.

Gary, we've just taken delivery of a Tos horizontal with the Heidenhain 530 control within the last couple weeks and the guys on the floor really like it. The only problem I'm having is sending programs to the machine, the control has a network card and hard drive built into it, but I'm told that it's UNIX based system and that I can't post directly to the hard drive on the machine. I have to post the file locally and the fire up a program called TNCremotNT to be able to send the program over. Maybe someone can suggest a way to post directly to the machcine. Neil.

Yes I did reset my allocations, everything else runs well.

Thanks Todd, that's exactly what I was looking for!!!!

Thanks for your replies, yes I have updated the posts to Ver9. Even the HTML setup sheet takes longer, oh well, no big deal. P. S. That WCS sure is sweet.

Hi, we just moved to Version 9 and I have a few questions that hope someone can answer for me. 1) Is it just me or does posting take a lot longer than in Ver 8. 2)Is there some way to get the operations to use the values of the last toolpath for rapid, retract, etc like version 8. In version 9, each time I create a new toolpath I have to adjust these settings from the defaults. Thanks for your help.