I machined plastics exclusively for nearly 10 years. Use air to remove the chips from your job if you dont have coolant. A spray bottle is a good idea if your machine is open and you need some coolant on your drills. Tip when drilling is to spin it slow eg 1200 rpm and 700mm feed with a 4mm peck. This will work all day long with no coolant. If you are making vacuum pods for a router I would not suggest using delrin. I have used these on a morbidelli router as well as milling machines and they always ended up cracking after repeating loadings with heavier full sheets of material. Nylon is fine as long as does not have a filler to complicate things. HSS definitely works better, but if this is not a production run don't worry about it. Carbide woodworking routers can be usefull but you might need to increase the relief a bit.

Maybe I should just wait for X

I spoke too soon. Feedrates do not match what they should be. eg. surface speed 100m/min feed per tooth per rev .1, diameter 3mm, flutes 2. All over-rides set at 100%. Should be something like 10600rpm and 2100mm/min. output from speed and feed calculator is 20000rpm and 24mm/min. Max spindle is set at 20000. What am I doing wrong??? Can the formula be manipulated in mastercam somehow??? This has become a bit of a personal crusade to get this working whether I end up using it or not. Bruce

Got it!!!!!! I redefined some materials and the calculator works on these but not on the old ones. Values are all the same so I must have a gremlin somewhere.

Wow is not exactly what I said, but it was close enough.........

They are named views. First example is just an angled face with a couple of tapped holes in it. Programmes verified, posted and ran perfectly. 2 weeks later I opened the file to check something and all tools using that named view were upside down, ie drilling from the bottom of the hole to the top, facing the inside surface etc Bruce

I have an old version6 post processor users guide, but need something a bit more helpfull. Where can I find a good reference book or manual??? Am using 9.1sp2

One way we make sure parts are machined is to drop them through a template into a sorting box before they are dried and packed. If the parts go through: they have been machined. If they don't...........

Thanks for that. We are doing a bit of a software upgrade shortly so I will see if re-installing everything works.

What I don't understand is how such a small country can produce so many different accents. Some are impossible to understand when they get a bit excited. Shift's over. I'm going home.

Due to a shortage of tradesmen here in Australia our shop is full of immigrants. Only problem is that they are ENGLISH!!!!

Thanks, It just happened again!!! I opened a job to get some sizes for our QC dept and ,lo and behold, more operations are upside down. These are 5 axis positioning ops and not 5 axis moves. The programmes as originally posted are fine but maybe moving from one seat to the next as sometimes happens in our office can bring about a conflict with some configs??? All seats are v9.1sp2

Thanks, but it didn't work. FPT is set at 0.2mm and % is at 100 and still nothing. We have MC on a couple of seats and no-one can get f&s to work. Is it a metric thing?

Thanks,

Thanks for your replys, What I am actually trying to do is generate a new set of tool libraries specifically for some ongoing work with dedicated tooling and known material qualities, without needing to add in all of the figures manually. I know that calculated speeds and feeds are never accurate, but the problem is that the feed function does not seem to be working on my system. Are there any switches or configs that need to be altered.

Thanks for your replys,

I have just started playing with the s&f calculator and cannot get a feed rate. Spindle speed calcs work fine, but no matter what values I enter for material etc, I get a feed rate of 0. ???????? Bruce

I have just had a problem with the tool planes on an existing 5 axis mastercam file. Some of the toolpaths have "reversed". The programmes that were originally posted are correct, but when I went to make some modifications some of the tools appear to be coming out of the table and not from the spindle. Internal profiling is now external profiling etc..... Not all operations are effected. Bruce

Thank you everybody.

I was thinking of using turbo pascal or basic to generate the text tool file from a list of tool diameters and material types. If any one else has done anything similar I would love to hear about it.

Unfortunately, I've been nominated as that someone.

Any quick way to set up a library from scratch??? Converting from text takes too long, so does entering data tool by tool.