We've had 3 machines upgraded, with windows XP and word 2003. Now a problem has cropped up, the VB script doc sheet I wrote is supposed to put a .EMF file of the part at the bottom of the sheet. However, with this combination, the .EMF file in the text box is solid black. Any ideas what may be causing this? John

Change to absolute retract. On our fadals, using the other retract methods will crash or gouge parts. What makes it interesting is that it (gouging) doesn't show up in verify. John

I guess I'm just looking for a easy fix to convert my VBS file from Word output to OO, but I guess it'll be more work than I really want to put into it. It took me several weeks to do, mostly cause I had to learn scripting and had lots of help from some great folks on this forum. FWIW, the VBS file I wrote is in the FTP, setupsheet.vbs I believe. John

Managment has asked me if I could convert my VBS setup sheet to run with open office ("becauses its free!") instead of Word that I wrote it for. From what I have been able to determine, OO doesn't use VBS. I'd like to hear from anyone else more experienced with programming scripts to confirm or deny this. Anyone? John

Don't have beta forum yet...but with beta 9, the problem goes away. Now problem is in my coding, where it is supposed to change the .MC9 filenmae to a .DOC extension when saving the word file. For some reason, the change isn't working...but I'm on it.

Our company has X beta. I've played with it some, but not a regular user...I'd rather wait til its actually read to relearn using it! Heres the script that does the metafile graphic: graphic="c:temptest.emf" DoMetafile graphic .Selection.ShapeRange.Select .ActiveDocument.Shapes.AddTextbox(msoTextOrientationHorizontal, 115, _ 480, 390, 302).Select .Selection.ShapeRange.TextFrame.TextRange.Select .Selection.Collapse .Selection.ShapeRange.Line.Visible = msoFalse .Selection.InlineShapes.AddPicture graphic,False,True John

My company has mastercam X whatever.I'm not one of the regular users (hence no access to MCX forums), but a VB script file I wrote to produce a doc sheet in V9.1 is putting out some funny results. The way the VBS file works (its in the FTP) is that it saves whatever image is in the MC window as a metafile as C:/TEMP/TESTFILE.EMF (never got around to changing the file name), then puts it at the bottom of the doc sheet. However, MCX doesn't seem to be saving the EMF file as instructed, but pulls up whatever the .EMF file in that directory happens to be. Any ideas? John

I really don't know offhand what our PC power is (we have several seats). Some are better than others, but most are over a year old, closer to 2 years. almost antiques. Yesterday, I was doing a parallell job with lots of 3D, took about 15 minutes to process that segment. John

Cimco HSM has greatly improved the finishes in our aluminum molds. The only downsides I've encountered so far is that processing time takes a good bit longer, and that it can get trick drawing boundary lines sometimes (no check surfaces). John

We have recently installed a couple of high speed machines, we are still experimenting with them though, but results are very good. 99% of our stuff is in aluminum, 6061 and 6013. We use hi-helix cutters for fast stock removal (roughing), and carbide ball mills where necessary for finishing. Most of our machines are Fadals, and we have seen some tremendous improvements in finish quality when applying some HSM techniques to these also. We have added the HSM C-hook to our MC, and that has been one of the biggest helps in finish quality recently. It takes awhile to process some toolpaths with it, and has some quirks, but it is good. John

I programmed in basic back in the day (early 80's!), and now when I wanted to make a VBS setupsheet, that helped, but I learned most of what I needed to know from the great folk here on the forum. Also learned much from VBS books (which, unfortunately, are more geared to the web than applications) and the somewhat sparse documention for MC VBS. Right now, my programming skills are rusty again. There are other things I could write, but there doesn't seem to be any demand in the shop here for them. I could do even better things if I could write Chooks, or even interface our vintage faroarm with mastercam. John

Also make sure that your retract is absolute instead of relative. I've never seen this problem with our Fadals using surface-rough-pocket (that I can remember anyway), but it often happens in restmill when you've got a really cluttered cavity. BTW, I haven't seen your part. No MC at home. John

In my case it turned out to be the company network...turned to crap. Fortunately, after waiting for the IT guys to actually get here and start their guessing, they restarted the network, and I got my file back. For some reason though, I had to reselect all my toolpaths. John

Damn, thats ironic. Right now I'm reprogramming a mold cause all the files in the directory have disappeared. The IT guy won't be here til 7, so I'm just reprogramming it. I think it actually has something to do with the network. John

Packaging for a major battery mfgr. heat seal packages, clamshell packages (the kind you need an ax to open), all kinds of trays in just about anything boxed...food gifts, games, aftermarket motorcycle parts, tools and tool parts, and many, many other thermoformed parts. Heck, odds are, you've handled one of our products at least once. John

DOH! Thanks!

Well I tried it, I could not find "change NCI", just change NCI destinations. Could someone walk me through this? Or is there something that needs to be enabled? John

I've got this flat plate to cut some slots in. It has 4 long slots, with about 1/2" on the outer walls and between the slots. What I want to do is put a optional stop in after each slot is cut so I can put extra clamps on the thin walls to stop them from vibrating and really messing up the walls. So is there a way to tell mastercam to put one in between each segment of the same tool? one segment per slot. Or am I going to have to manually edit the file? John

I have run a scanned drawing through a raster to vector program, and am now in the process of tracing the vector image for a cleaner image. Not having needed to do this before in MC, is there a way to turn the vector image "off" but still be visible so I can trace it without MC latching onto the nearest endpoint in the vector drawing, just what I've already drawn in the level(s) I want. I'm sure there is something obvious I'm missing... John

Mark, Do you have any transform operations in your program? that will crash the set up sheet. Its a bug with MC. You need to save your program, delete the transforms, then run the setup sheet. Also, it does do funny things if you skip a tool, such as having a tool 1, 3, 5, but no tool 2 or 4. This is such a rare event where I work, so I didn't worry about it. I didn't even think of this as a bug. You can always edit the document in Word. John

It should have a white background. Don't know why yours doesn't??

Forgot to mention a couple of things...I think the script on the FTP does not have the update that writes the graphic to C:/temp. And the reason the graphic is being written to the text box is that I used the text boxes to format the sheet layout. Makes it a whole lot easier! John

I wrote that script. The EMF file is the skeletonized graphic of the part that is on your screen when you run the setup sheet script. It was originally written to to write this file to a network drive, but I have since changed that to C:/temp, as people were getting other folks graphic! we have several mastercam seats here. This would be a good time to mention there is a major bug in that if your program has any Transform operations in it, running the script will crash your mastercam. There is supposed to be a patch avaible (Mick? you remember what it was?), but the alternative is to save your program, delete the transform operations, then run the script. John

FWIW, that piece of script I wrote is only looking for input from the user. It will take anything except those strings matched in the last line (prog. no, ""(blank), or esc key. You can enter any piece of garbage, including a blank space then it will go on. John

Gregg T, Look in the FTP site for a .VBS setup sheet I U/L a few months ago. For the life of me, I can't remember what I named it (probably setup.vbs), and it works well. I tried messing with the .set setup sheets, but just couldn't get the HTML to format correctly when it came to breaking the tool list into 2 columns. John T.