1 hour ago, Tim Johnson said:

I have an Areon chair (Herman Miller) here at work. The front edge of the chair has padding and I mostly sit in it like Lisa Simpson's chair (don't know the name). This posture keeps my back straight naturally and doesn't cut off the blood supply to my legs. I've looked at Varidesk but it appears they have nothing that will fit four monitors.

I have the Pro 48 and it holds 3; you'd have to be creative to get 4 on it.

I have a Varidesk that can switch between sit/stand, but I never put it down. I don't even have a chair anymore. I haven't "sat" at my workstation in probably 2 years. I do so much walking back and forth to check on things that sitting down would be impractical.

I'm also 6'2" and standard desk height at 29" plus this thing rising roughly 16" wasn't enough for me so I had to build some 6" risers.

A bunch of people have them here and they alternate pretty frequently between sitting and standing. At 35, I'm one of the youngest people in management here so standing doesn't bother me as much--my beer belly is still a work in progress and doesn't affect me yet.

The key is finding comfortable shoes and a good mat.

Viewsheets are great for tombstone work.

On 5/9/2017 at 10:28 AM, Mr. M said:

The issue there is that the TSC hole on the Okuma pull studs is small and does not allow a large enough wrench through. (4mm hole vs a 6mm hole needed). The ERI is nice but it is actually the Showa  (With the same lack of availability)

I'll check out the SK. I have used them in bigger sizes and they did only "OK" but I was asking a lot of them. My tooling supplier is recommending just a RegoFix ER11 system. Ill have to see how they compare.

 

Check out Techniks with their Slim-fit system. We use them constantly and they have excellent runout control. The system uses an internal nut, and they supply the drive key that is small enough to fit an Okuma knob thru-hole. They can hold up to a 1/4 inch with the right collet, but they really shine with smaller tools. You can get them in 4, 6, and 8 inch lengths.

We use ER11's also, but I prefer the slim fit.

Because you guys are supposed to be doing your Duty to this Country and telling any commie Frenchman who tries to use metric to get their head out of their butt and switch over to Freedom Units.

I'm being sarcastic, of course. It would be useful as sometimes to need to see exactly where a tooth might cut. Only way around it is to use custom defined tools.

21 hours ago, Gutty said:

Thanks for the input guys... At half the price of a P4000, how would the P2000 go ? 

And what's the difference between K, M and P models ?

I just posted in another thread that I bought a new workstation with the P2000. It's "mid range" for their P architecture, roughly equivalent to the older M4000 models so it's a good card (supposedly. I haven't got by new workstation yet to confirm.)

Check out this article where they benchmark the new P architecture to the old M and K:

http://www.develop3d.com/hardware/quadro-p400-p600-p1000-p2000-p4000-cad-vr-viz-solidworks-vred-iray-pascal

The K, M, P stands for the architecture: Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal.

1 hour ago, kunfuzed said:

We are working on convincing management to upgrade us... One guy even did a time loss study with help from our reseller.  Most guys have 16g's, but a slower I7 processor.  I got a handed down engineering computer with a faster Xeon, but only 8g's.

I just ordered a new workstation with the E5-2620 Broadwell CPU, 32 gig RAM, and the brand (spankin'!) new Quadro P2000. Watercooled, too! I am Much Excite. Should be here later this week. Ordered it from Titan Computers. Was spec'ing out a Dell (because corporate, duh) and they didn't offer the P2000 and anything comparable older gen cost an extreme amount for what it was. So I got a better computer for half the cost, and that's how I managed to seal the deal.

I have this problem now with 2017, never had it with previous releases. I even took a video of it and sent it to CNC Software; this was over a year ago and it never got any traction because they couldn't replicate it.

I posted the video below. I run triple monitors, but I trimmed it to two for the video to make it easier to see. It only seems to happen if I click on the ribbon bar or above, so to stop it from following I have to click somewhere below it.

I'll just throw in that I don't use X+, nor do I have Chrome installed on my PC, and I still got the error.

2 hours ago, Brian Pallas said:

Sound cool, and something I want to look into.  Thanks.  

What do you pass to the macro - diameter of the bore, diameter of cutter, pitch and depth?

Hole dia, tool dia, depth, pitch, feed plane height, feed. The macro can adjust the feed to compensate using the internal radius reduction formula.

I also do the same this with a threadmill macro.

Yeah, I saw that this morning as well. Eventually it closed out by itself.

I run helix bore macros that are stored in the machines, and I've set up my post so that when I program a helix bore, the post pulls all the important info from the NCI and outputs it as a G65 (or G66) macro line; and since the macro is in the machine there is no subprogram to worry about outputting with the main program. Also, since I switch it on or off using a misc var, it has no effect at all on backplot or verify. So, basically like Colin said, minus the additional sub routine.

Mcam can do C and Y all day long. Heck, I've used it to program parts that don't have a single turned dimension on the part.

I've got a Velocifire w/ Cherry brown knock off switches. Not the same feel as reds, obviously, but pretty good for day to day use.

https://www.amazon.com/Velocifire-Mechanical-Keyboard-Illuminated-Anti-ghosting/dp/B01M0QEYR4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1492447014&sr=8-1&keywords=velocifire

1 hour ago, Jay Kramer @ Precision Programming said:

We agree to with Ron. We carry the insurance to and back everything up. and the thought is to make this your mainstay is tough if your are need a constant income.
That is why I started offer other things and not making my only basket to pick from.

And apparently one of the perks is being able to day drink...

They said they are still working on the bugs and fine tuning the software before release. So while it won't be included with the initial public release of 2018, it will be added on later as part of a (free) update. It will be part of regular ol' lathe, not exclusive to Mill/Turn. That's what I've gathered from the other site, anywhoo.

EDIT: Well, somehow I missed this entire last page and the fact that the question has been answered. So I'll just leave a joke about newbeeee:

Where can you find 66,100,100 French jokes?

In France!

I've been running a Dell M6800 for a few years now, with a dock to run two additional monitors. It has no problem handling Mcam 2017, Solidworks, Polyworks, etc.

I wish I had a desktop, though.

Harvey has .dxf for all their tools on their website so you don't have to draw them from scratch, but you do have to fiddle with them to make them work with Mastercams requirements.

As for toolpathing, everybody is correct in that there is no "easy" way to do it since the back chamfering functionality does not exist in Mcam. I do this all the time and the best way to do it is with a calculator and verifying the toolpath with simulator.

You don't happen to use the Mill/Turn package, do you? There was (don't know if they fixed it_ a major bug where, when you opened up a Mill/Turn environment, and then opened up any other non-Mill/Turn machine definition, it would ignore all misc. ints in the definition. The only way to clear it is to shut down Mcam and open it back up. If you open up Mill/Turn again, then you have to shut it down and restart before working on any other type of machine.

Additionally, to what you already tried, unless you change the mach. def. defaults, it will always revert back every time you open up a new file.

45 minutes ago, DODGERFAN said:

Where is your shop located?

Toledo, Ohio

It's funny to me the problems you guys are describing with the Mori service and wanting to switch to Okuma. We're the exact opposite--an all-Okuma shop fed up with their service and switching to Mori.

Although to be fair the problem isn't Okuma itself, but the distributor.

I also think it would help the programming side immensely if we had up-to-date tool library information we could trust to program with, without having to wander into the shop to verify. Like you said, time savings is something that can be hard to quantify but can make a huge difference down the road.

 

 

This was one of the best things for me, as a programmer. No more running around making sure the tool was still available only to find out someone burned it up and never replaced it. We built the new tool room just for this project and it also became my programming office (until I got moved on to bigger roles like I am in now.) THAT was great, even before we had the software up and running, because I could just walk over and open a drawer to verify it was there.

It's still a work in progress, and some organization still needs to be done, but this is how the room looks now:

What is a EQN file format? is this a file format for anther CAD software if so which one?

Why would you want to open a WordPerfect file in a CAM system?

I thought you guys were supposed to be gurus.

*.EQN files are equation files used by a few chooks like fplot. You can use them to draw sine waves, involute splines, or other trick things:

https://youtu.be/LG3ro7u-izU?t=129

That is Zoller, correct? Not sure how large your shop is, but would you recommend it to a shop on the *relatively* smaller size - we have about a dozen mills (though that is going to increase in the near future).

 

And yeah, apart from learning the software and building the databases, the biggest hurdle by far is going to be making sure everyone in the shop abides by the proper practices. 

Yes, Zoller. We use it to track tooling for 26 machines (lathes, mills, multi-task). I think it would be fine for your size shop, especially if you know you are expanding, although I bet it will make it harder to justify the cost. Once we got organized and started using it fully, we were seeing a savings of around $15,000 a month in tooling. Which means our investment is paid off already, and since we're ESOP, once everyone saw that money they we're like, "yeah, this is the right thing to do."

The difference will be in how organized your shop is. Our shop stared in 1956 and the guys kind of carried that mentality over from year to year. I started in aerospace so when I came here I knew we were throwing away money with disorganization so, when I finally had enough weight to throw around, I threw it at this project and got it started. If your shop already has decent discipline, your ROI might be a lot longer.

EDIT: just want to point out that the savings was in tooling alone by reducing redundant inventory and doesn't come close to capturing the time we save during set-ups and such. We're a job shop so we're doing set-ups all day, every day and that time alone is worth more than I can count.

We just started too (silver only) but what a huge job and how to be sure to do it the right way...

It's been a year since we purchased and began implementing TMS Silver. It's been working great; biggest problem was changing the mindset of all the employees that use it.