Analyze chain shows the radius of each arc in the chain, but it would be awesome if it showed the minimum and maximum radius of the chain in a summary. Is there yet any way to do it fast?

You could probably do it in AutoHotKey or similar program but it is not a trivial task. MY nemesis has become the op tree items expanding by itself!

We have a couple of VDI lathe live tools using ER collet and opening and tightening them has always been a real PIA. I have to hold a key in a slot below the nut and rotate the nut with another key, the slot is almost completely worn away. So, I was thinking about making a loosening/tightening pot that will prevent the spindle from rotating while working with the nut, but the downside is that the forces will be transmitted through the gears. I'm sure this is not a recommended practice so how much will this potentially damage the tools in the long run?

Yes, it helped me get rid of the pesky "not all operations selected" message, thank you! It is a "hack" but it works. How about adding a "send a click to a control on form" feature? In the original question, the asker wanted a certain checkbox to get unchecked automatically. You could type in {TAB}{TAB}...{TAB}{SPACE} but a straight click would be a bit "cleaner"

OT but broaching on our lathe makes the Z-axis servo motor so hot we have to apply air pressure to it to avoid excess temperature alarm.

Yes I am aware of Mastercam's extensibility, which is a very very good thing. But I understood that while it's possible to add new features and functionality via hooks, it is not possible to modify the existing components. While I'm still quite a novice with the program (7+ years compared to the 15-20 years of many of you, any polls ever made?) I think less message boxes and more "don't never ever show this message again" checkboxes would be quite welcome. Not going to mention ribbon bar now... I hope to find a less draining job sometime in the future (totally away from the machine, it's not healthy in the long term) so that I had the energy to dig into Mastercam's programming interface. I already downloaded everything there is on Mastercam.com Don't get me wrong, Mastercam rocks. I wouldn't touch the alternative software I previously used with with a 10 foot pole.

I very seldom use the filters because there is simply not enough tools in the house for it to save time. I wish the "Filters..." subdialog didn't exist at all but instead I could quick select the filters in the library window. Mastercam should open source their GUI and only the back-end (core, toolpaths etc.) would require a HASP. This way everybody could make their own GUI and be happy.

Thanks for the tip!

This irks me as well with Supernurbs enabled on Okuma control.

What I meant was drill the chamfer so that the tool won't move in X or Y but just drill deep enough to create a similar chamfer to all the holes. Consider there'a two holes, one 4mm of diameter and the other is 10mm. If I used 2D chamfer on both (which is what I do right now) it would use the very tip of the tool for both holes and chamfering the 10mm hole would be a bit slower.

There's a plate with dozens of holes of different sizes. Is there a way to chamfer them all with a custom chamfering value just by plunging instead 2D chamfer milling?

We mill in the range of 10000m/min (400ipm) almost every day, high FEED machining mostly Cromoly and Toolox steel. It takes a rigid machine (Okuma mill here); high SPEED machining would be more suitable for a less rigid one. Nothing major broken so far, apart from a bunch of indexable cutters due to the lack of tool life control (it is coming soon...!) It is very noisy, though.

Not in metric.

What if I wanted to use or my feed was auto-calculated to 9999? Magic numbers are bad

I just don't understand why you can change the work offset in the toolpath operation, which will then change the work offset in every operation using the same work plane. It makes no sense.

Well, I am surprised. I expected your answers to be more like "How can you ignore such an essential feature of Mastercam?", but I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one who doesn't like to play with percentages. Fully agree, but you have to have some kind of starting point, right?

I was being tongue-in-cheek but apparently failed. However, there is nothing wrong with not being able to use dynamic macros etc. I do them by hand when needed.

but instead create a tool for each material, adding the material name to the tool name?

I love macros. Mastercam calls itself "the world's most dynamic CAM", but how come all the numeric fields in the program are static? Sure there still is a lot of truth in that statement.. Is there CAM programs that can inherently output macros when you type variable names into numeric fields, such as driling depth?

It's not set to auto backup, that's a different story. It does this when pushing the "Save" button - creates an incremental backup of the old project and saves the new project. After selecting the file save, in my opinion, the cursor should turn into a hourglass and UI shouldn't respond until both backup and save are done. I saved the file and thought it was done, so I made some temporary changes and only after that it did save, saving the temporary changes it shouldn't have saved.

Maybe mentioned before, maybe not. When (incremental) backup is enabled, there is some latency (sometimes remarkable, especially when using a network drive) between making the backup file and saving the Mastercam file. During this latency the user can interact with the user interface. The user shouldn't be allowed to do anything until the backup-save process has been completely finished. I just made a mistake because of this...

Or use 2D ramp with plunge instead of depth cuts.

I'd just create the main program by hand and apply work offset shifting, subroutine calls and pallet rotations where needed. Getting it all done properly in Mastercam is not going to be "pretty".

It can't do that. With EA manager you can assign a style (eg color) to a single entity type, such as red for straight lines, yellow for arcs, blue for surfaces etc. What's even more odd is that since X9 (or 2017, dunno) you can assign color to a PLANE. What would be the use of that??

You can't. As long as I have been using Mastercam, I never ceased asking the question: why?