That's the thing, it's not fraud if the accident caused damage to your property. Is it still functional? Maybe, but that's still damage that you are paying damage against. You bet that would come off your resale value. Now the level of damage, sure - but depending on the investigator they'll just mark it as damaged, the office will look up the value and determine if you just get paid out to replace.

That's wild Colin glad you and your family are safe. Something to consider too is if say your TV is even scratched, you could submit a claim under renters insurance, new couch etc. It might feel a little bad because your stuff isn't wrecked, but you pay a lifetime into insurance for times like these, and people who are much more well off jump through much smaller hoops. Again glad everyone is safe because those pictures are scary

Just a followup to this - we had the same problem on 2019 pop up on a laptop, the workaround was it didn't have full Admin rights, we had to run as administrator

If you don't have a subprogram and the control is set to subprogram 'BEFORE' main, an EXT file is posted, with a blank NC file. Previous versions MPmaster didn't do this

You ever get this working? I have the path working out okay but it always puts an "NCI" in the the file extention so things post as: *.NCI.NC ... this sucks because it hoses file paths

This is great thanks Colin, I might be seeing what Terrance is talking about as well. In every past version of Mastercam, once I updated the Machine & Control, and Post files, if I sent those files to someone else they could then put then in a folder, and see them on the 'Manage List' window for adding machine definitions to lists of selections. If I use the migration utility to go from 2018 to 2019 or 19-20, this list is populated correctly - but if I then grab these now 'updated' mcam-mmd, mcam-control and .pst (why can't we change that extension already!!!) and send them to someone on the updated version, they can't see those files in the 'Manage list' window.

Frank, I'm having this exact issue on one computer out of six, all running the same 2019 build version of mastercam, all running the same post/machine/control def. I'm sure you got on with your life, but I'm going to try to solve right now and will post back

right good point

Hi Ajmer!

Extend to infinity pretty much what it says it is - take your tool and imagine it is as long as infinity, going back into your machine. It is useful if you have a cut angle that you know might run your head into something - you can add a tilt /avoidance strategy. Also very useful to control machines that don't have a physical tool (like spraying or blasting)

I think he just wants what Roger mentioned outputting vector information can be done in the post but is not for the faint of heart; even experienced programmers will find matrix calculations frustrating at first blush in post. NEThook would be easy enough to write jlw, how bad you want something? If you only need to do this once, and having a unit vector (i,j,k) is okay. You can save the file as a .STEP then open it as a text file. iThere will be a section for each line, you can search/replace everything else to just be left with points / vector (Direction) ie: 104=LINE('',#101,#103); #105=CARTESIAN_POINT('',(0.869525945998740,-1.491090563615069,1.013089119252023)); #106=TRIMMED_CURVE('',#104,(PARAMETER_VALUE(0.0),#101),(PARAMETER_VALUE(1.0),#105),.T.,.PARAMETER.); #107=CARTESIAN_POINT('',(0.618476426778893,0.380408095902425,0.708966688719660)); #108=CARTESIAN_POINT('',(0.618476426778893,0.380408095902425,0.708966688719660)); #109=DIRECTION('',(0.851776802699722,0.523904837143769,0.0)); #110=VECTOR('',#109,1.0);

I'm worried about the grain & knots on that neck. Looks cool but that thing might MOVE

Corian is great stuff!! thanks for the accoya suggestion - I didn't know about that and it looks really solid. We use a lot of mahogany & Sapele - I'm amazed at how well they do outside with little effort. I just made a sign out of Walnut for... some reason - I saw a great walnut sign that seemed to have withstood the San Diego sun, but time will tell on mine

Engraving toolpaths can work, but you can probably achieve that desired look using 2-D pocket & contour, along with an engraving bit to chamfer edges, and use different depths. The nice thing is the things you learn in Mastercam from this are applicable to all sorts of other work

Some tools come and go but the big red toolbox is a fixture in the shop - Happy to have the staff at CNC.

yeah that's what I meant - I think for almost anyone it would be more effective to pay someone else to develop in MP than to learn more advanced functions unless you plan to be with Mastercam for a long time and forsee needing to change the post quite a bit. The big limitations to MP like you mentioned being 1D arrays so matrix math is a pain. I think the biggest limitation is it forces someone who may already be comfortable OOP in modern languages to fight against programming instincts. The buffer filestream is a nightmare to explain to someone and so there's a huge barrier to entry which I can only imagine holds back post development at CNC as much as it would at any other company. I'm sure there's far more to it than that As far as quick script-like programming, Python is lightning quick as an alternative.

If you're comfortable with vector may and 3x3 matrix rotations, the hardest part of the vector math in 5axis posts is realizing how a matrix is represented and manipulated in MP. So I would +1 to what mkd & watcher said - I would only recommend spending time in MP if you're looking for some wham-bam output but if you're thinking long-haul development, in for a lot of headbanging in a proprietary language.

nice! In the future you might try using the walls as drive and control some roughing using depth-cuts/multi-pass and a side tilt angle of like 87 degrees. not the best but sometimes you want better control on the tilt angle for the inside of a cavity and you gotta watch the material engagement on the rough

Does it convert and approximate edges as true solid faces or do you get a polygonal faceted solid? In any case I would be careful with conversions because it's either averaging or you're going to get a mess and you might as well cut from the original STL. Most of the time the STL is from something you're not trying to hold a tight tolerance to anyway

Have you checked out the rest-mill toolpaths?

if you need to manipulate the STL try out Meshlab - sometimes slicing it is the way to go.

If what you're doing is what I think, Curve toolpath is not good at projecting the edges of a surface to the same surface. Seems silly I know because 90% of the time you're going to want to be trimming 'around' a surface if you're using this path to trim something. I've brought this up a million times and the path has gotten better but it still comes down to a tolerance of the surface edge vs. the 'loop' it creates around it - I thought this wouldn't happen in Mcam for Solidworks. Like Ron said you'll often avoid this while using Lines, but you have to watch sometimes on sharp edges. If you really want to use the surface, if you untrim it, then it should work out well - it gives the toolpath some 'meat' to project onto during calculation.

Been awhile since I've looked at FBM - I liked the geometry/plane creation and if tools are set up well ahead of time it works, but for what you mentioned setting different stock to leave maybe, or knowing to use a tap in a hole of a certain size... that might not get you where you want to be

hey nice avatar