Hey Dylan I was just curious if this applies when creating planes via the "dynamic plane" option. Usualy when I am creating planes I have historically just dragged the Gnomon from the bottom left of the graphics window and applied it to my model in whatever orientation I want. I like this because I can do Autocursor to "face center" to get a plane on an angled face where I don't know the exact rotation angle. Would the parent-child relationship respect that plane creation method if I then go rotating/mirroring models? Thanks!

Nice I will give this a go...I didn't think muhc of gouge check when doing negative angles but now it makes more sense

No way, that is too easy! Yes that is the way to do it. What I really hoped is that this functionality was somehow built in already.

Once you get adjusted and used to the new features, basically you can't go back. It is like an egg - you can't unscramble the egg! My favorite has been the Unified multiaxis toolpath. Total gamechanger for me. Autochaining is one I haven't had an application for yet but I intend to heavily use Can you elaborate on this? I just posted a topic on sharp external corners

I would like someone *anyone* to make a quick youtube tutorial on how to export Mastercam tooling data in .CSV format or something similar so that I can harness excel in my tooling management workflow.

Hey geniuses, can you all tell me if I am being dumb or missing something ? I have been wondering this for awhile but I have never had much of a part for its application but now I do. Below are the features in question The idea here is to slot these cutouts with contour toolpath such as this Without chaining all the way around the bosses, is there a way to "break the corners" on those edges? I am trying to not chain the entire boss and only want to slot them as shown. Basically I want a 0.005" edge break, much like you might do here: Is there a way to do this so that the lead-in motion includes a tiny arc segment that breaks the edges? Or would I need to create a bunch of geometry? Even when I set the lead in to -90degrees and a 0.005 external edge break set to "All" it isn't breaking. I want this to be a feature! "edge break on lead in/lead out" is what it could be called. Slow painful way to do this is to add a 0.005" radius to the start and end of each contour. Doesn't sounds like fun. thanks

It is interesting and its all going to be Macro b i think. The new advanced drill toolpath does solve some(many, not all) of the issues I have had with custom drill cycles which eliminates the need for certain macros. Here is a good primer on Macro B https://www.practicalmachinist.com/vb/cnc-machining/macro-programming-fundamentals-167395/ https://www.cnccookbook.com/cnc-macro-programming-fanuc-macro-b/

Do you edit your own multiaxis posts, Colin? Seems like a daunting task I wonder because I know you do a lot of post work and I was chatting with a shop owner recently and he said he generally just does edits directly thru Postability as his CNC programmers aren't exactly coders and 5-axis posts are extremely complex. Basically a situation of "let the programmers program and let the coders/devs code/dev" Just curious!

I seem to recall in a webinar or lesson from some advanced member here that the MPPost logic format was going to be faded out eventually. I think that was mentioned several years ago and was curious if anyone knew anything about that. It was said "itll happen in a few years"....welp it has been a few years! From my understanding they were going to consolidate all kinds of legacy coding logic under a new "system" so to speak. I am no coder so I apologize if my terms are wrong. Or maybe I am misremembering?

I would love the FTP because it seems people have contributed some really helpful stuff there in the past...things like files being too large to post on the forum etc. Is there a shared Google Drive we could contribute to? dunno if that kinda solves the same problem or not but I like the idea of a repository. Now obviously the MW Help File is available thru mastercam but that didn't used to be the case. Additionally I had to get the MP Post documentation from the reseller physically mailed to me lol (only 2 years ago...) Seems silly.

Yea I'll be honest I have a hard time seeing Sandvik pull the ADSK route and nuke product lines by rolling them into a single product (Fusion), but who knows? Could theoretically happen, but Sandvik is no Autodesk. I would be interested to see if this affects Mastercam's millturn line...from what I gather it still has a lot to gain on a software like Esprit in that realm.

That makes sense, thanks. I can see the utility for sure, on my end specifically for post editing.

Moduleworks are the real kings here, no? They have all the beautiful algorithms that everyone loves and uses! Serious toolpath control as well I purchased awhile ago and I got SDVKY...I honestly can't figure it out myself. Same divisions? Different divisions? Can't figure it out.

I don;t know the deets on the CGtech acquisition but this one won't finalize until Q4 so until 2022 you likely won't even notice anything. When Mcam 2023 is released, well thats when the true colors will be shown. I hope those colors are very similar to the colors we see now! Im conflicted with things like this bcuz 2 things can happen - 1 is the ADSK vision where everything sucks. Option 2 is that now you have this company backing you with basically infinite capital and resources that can really allow for some aggressive product development and enhancement much faster than if you were a smaller fish. You can only hire so much talent so fast before you over extend your company. Hoping we see option 2 here...

I knew this was eventually going to happen! I want Vericut and Mastercam to be under the same umbrella I called it literally 3 weeks ago on the PM forum when they announced they snatched up Cambrio

I am curious about this experiment! I love it, and one of the reasons I don't work in production is that many owners simply expect you to work 60 hours as if it is normal. Once in awhile for a push is fine but not every week. What type of spindle up time are you aiming for? 70%? Have you considered 4 10s as an option as well?

As far as cloud is concerned - yes it can slow things down some. However all my master files are cloud stored on an intranet (maybe not true cloud?) and they appear to perform just as well in those locations as they do when I have experimented with local storage. My main CMD, MMD, and Defaults files are network stored as well. Is that what you mean when you say "working from the cloud" and being a slave to that speed? As far as SSD, I will never run a PC without it now. When I got my workstation they forgot to swap the HDD for the SDD and it was like...lightyears slower. Booting Mastercam took 60 seconds, and with SSD it takes 5-10 seconds. Regen is much faster, everything is better with SSD.

I appear to be a total noob with this but I am guessing you do this because you want to compare old code vs new code? I find that I am usually reposting code and trying to avoid hand edits if possible. Mind educating an ignorant soul on what the value of something like Notepad++ would be for the CNC programmer?

The ability to quick rename viewsheets would be nice, much like with groups you can double slow click and immediately rename, wheras with Viewsheets I believe the only way to rename is right click --> rename. Not a huge deal but I hate extra clicks! Ill try your new chook out, thanks!

Can u give a quick rundown of what functionality this viewsheet manager adds? Is it strictly a tree-style view option?

Good answers here - I would like to think that you'll want a system - any system - and make it simple and clean. The problem is, people do things one way, another person does things another way. What you want to avoid is the silo-ing of knowledge that I see too often occur. What I mean is we have a guy named Mike. Mike helps get your machine shop setup and running, helps integrate the CAM into your company workflow, and man is he a good machinist/programmer. Mike does things his own way though. So yea while he follows the system pretty well he also has his own system (mental or otherwise). He even has a massive spreadsheet of what the company would consider critical data such as feeds/speed recipes for specific applications and also a fixture numbering scheme that helps keep his portion of the business organized. Mike gets a job offer at SpaceX so he is leaving the company. Guess where all that data is going? It's probably going along with Mike to SpaceX. So now your company is losing that data and the time and energy it took the guy to create that data. One way to circumvent this is what we do - we have an intranet network that deposits all of this key data into a shared location that anyone (or only some people) have access to. It is all organized by use-case need. HR people don't need speeds and feeds so it is organized as such. This helps with the little things, things that don't make sense to have into a formal system or ERP or PDM software you run. Things like contact info. You'll think I am a little wonky but I am not because it is really nice to have your rockstar service tech's cell number on hand so you can reach out directly (during business hours!) to that individual instead of having to go to the main office and try to get the tech on the line. If that # is only in someone's phone and that person leaves then you have a problem! At a most basic level you can name revs like "PN 123-456-789_Rev2.1_Jun2021" Anyways I'll stop waxing poetic about the beauty of systems and whatever but I would say it is a mission critical portion of any business that needs some serious thought put into it by any key stakeholders. Edit - another thing that I simply DO NOT do is saving NC files in a big database. For one thing, it may or may not be actually what you think it is. It may say it is the version you want but it might be that it got overwritten at one point. I always re-post from the Mastercam source file and overwrite whatever was there before.

Are you saying that you don't use BE at all? Or just for the finishing? Morph does seem like a good option

This is a good thread and it reminds me of writing mastercam programs for our 2 axis Prototrak lathes. It took me a good while to get all the issues hammered out. We still havent found a good post that eliminates hand editing yet. For ex, i had a drilling op that I programmed. Had to go in there and dick around and actually change what cycle it runs on the drill op because it freaked out over G73 for whatever reason. Some of the fun (and hair pulling) in this game is hunting down these gremlins when they pop up. And it is never fun when you need to do something like figure out a post issue when you need production up and running on the parts. I want to throw in my tidbit of guidance - I have given up completely on MCfSW in my applications. And I am in the education field, so I am always trying to find the EASIEST CAM transition for brand new students. Granted it has been a handful of years since I switched back to teaching standalone mastercam, but I was having crashing issues, licensing issues, posting issues, and general lack of 100% of the features that I am used to in Mcam standalone. Never fun when half your class crashes the software after an hour of putting in the toolpathing work! There are a handful of important functions that just don't exist or function in a different manner. I have realized that Mastercam is really good at what it does - Driving toolpaths. Solidworks is really good at what it does - Creating CAD data. In my limited experience (6 yrs teaching) I have found standalone Mastercam is just better at driving toolpaths IMO, but your mileage may vary.

Yeap this is a prototype part not a production item. By the time I see it again the design will be fully revved and my old paths won't be useful anymore

Great advice. I will break down my workflow thought process: I developed my 100 toolpaths for the first part. Great. I realized I can’t mirror all 100 just that easily so I did it via chunking - initial roughing, Optirough and then the 5 axis toolpaths were all separate toolpath groups and separate transformations. So it the end I had like 7 new toolpath groups consisting of the transformed toolpaths. Everything “looked” good but under closer inspection obviously was not. So I wasn’t necessarily doing a single transform across the board. im sure my method might work to a certain extent but in this case needed some extra scrutiny. Live and learn!