"cobalt-nickel-chromium alloy with molybdenum" It's a treat to cut, we use it for some of our medical products. That combination of materials makes it interesting, funny part is I'd love to do the sizes your looking at, right now we are doing 1/8" diameter and under down to Ø.0085" drilled holes. carbide circuit drills with speeder heads to 80k rpm also running jahbro cutters. The material was only 38 Rc but it's darn tuff. I was burning up Robb Jack tuffy's (it's all we had on hand) 1 cutter / part. Went to the right Jahbro tool and I could do 100 parts and was only beginning to see wear. My advice is we worked with our tooling vendors to find the appropriate tooling, speeds and feeds to do what we needed and you may want to do the same. Jahbro is now under Seco and they were excellent to work with. Good luck!

I use it in X5 just fine previously on XP 32 bit and now on WIN 7 64. Sorry I don't have more to offer. B

Do you by chance have admin rights as a user? Can you try starting Mastercam by right mouse clicking to start the program and run it elevated to see if this may help? Our I.S. here now has everything locked and it makes life VERY HARD to try and do simple things. We can't even share file folders on our pc's to dump programs to our machines... arghhh.

In hardened D2 I've had the greatest success using Jahbro tooling sold by seco now. Their tech support was VERY helpful for speeds / feeds and cutter recommendations. One my other projects was MP35N and went from using coated tuffy Robb Jacks one EM per part basically to a Jabhro I made it through 100 parts. Cutter geometry was crucial along with speeds and feeds. Anyway, glad you got it worked out. B

What are you looking to do, production vs proto-types? We have Makino's and Charmilles here and they both have their advantages / disadvantages.

Sounds like training would be a good start and stay with the Solidworks. The other thing I'm picking up is not just the prints but drafting habits. The what and how you use your sketches/features is as your seeing going to greatly affect your outcome. Next in line is to make standards for the drafting practices so if someone does pull in another "config" they know what to expect. Of course it's easy for me to say that not knowing what products you are making but experience has shown me that no two people draft alike =), doesn't mean that there can't be some conformity. If similar practices can be implemented using the configs you will hopefully have a smoother system for using MC especially when importing and being able to select the config file right there on file opening for what you need. Ask your software VAR for some guidance and review of your process and see what suggestions they may have. Good luck.

This conversation is soooo old around here at our work. Press fit starts with size on size and goes from there. What's the bushing material / surface finish / coatings? What's your positional tolerance for the final placement of the bushing? Will you give the bushing a nice lead in or the hole to get a decent alignment started? +1 to djstedman, the handbook has some good information. as for all of my questions don't take them wrong, they are just part of the years of the continual evolvement around here of Engineers re-engineering the physics of reality.... in a nustshell getting a bigger BFH. And I could add alot more to the list...

Material and machine info would help, coolant options also. the more info on your setup will help.

Hope this works for you. HTH Brad 3719-1208.MCX-5

2D swept, I'd recommend drawing in your leadin/leadout diameter and you'll be good to go.

Service and support I would add in are also one of the BIGGEST factors for choosing right behind functionality. As you try to learn a new software will you be on your own or will you have resources to help guide / show you how to find the best process for YOUR needs not the softwares.

Welcome to the forum Chris, also after importing if you are still wondering what all is on your screen go up to your top menus and find "screen" and then click on "statistics". That should tell you what kind of entities are on the screen. Like Tom asked if your bringing in solids and you don't have the solids option you won't be able to work with anything.

Sample extrak code, still using our version from MC-9. As others asked what exactly are you looking for MMD's/CD's , post info....? 0000 EZTRAK|SX 0 MODE|INCH |MON AUG 06 07:35:00 2012 0010 || TOOLCHG T239 0020 RAPID ABS X0. Y.25 Z.1 0030 LINE ABS X0. Y.25 Z0. F6.4 0040 LINE ABS X1. Y.25 Z0. F6.4 0050 ARC|CNTRPT ABS CW X1.25 Y0. Z0. XC1. YC0. F6.4 0060 LINE ABS X1.25 Y-1. Z0. F6.4 0070 ARC|CNTRPT ABS CW X1. Y-1.25 Z0. XC1. YC-1. F6.4 0080 LINE ABS X0. Y-1.25 Z0. F6.4 0090 ARC|CNTRPT ABS CW X-.25 Y-1. Z0. XC0. YC-1. F6.4 0100 LINE ABS X-.25 Y0. Z0. F6.4 0110 ARC|CNTRPT ABS CW X0. Y.25 Z0. XC0. YC0. F6.4 0120 LINE ABS X0. Y.25 Z.1 F6.4 0130 || END|PRGM

If all else fails and you can figure the rotation angle for each letter simply do each individually (yes I know a pain) as a contour projected onto a surface. Contour 1st letter project to surface rotate for next letter so on and so on...

Another trick I use is not necessarily the tooling but the path chaining. I'll chain as much of the path in one opps and keep the tool engaged to ensure cutting forces. I'll chain it using the partial chain with waiting and reverse back on legs even a little to keep the tool in and moving. It's a lot more time sometimes up front but look at how many parts you have the every time that tool has to plunge if your doing bigger runs of parts. Saves tooling and finish. If your tool can handle a single depth of cut your golden, usually then I just have to maybe wrap a piece of sandpaper around a honing stone and give it a nice quick draw polish.

What requirements are you looking to meet? are you looking to simply verify the interim measurements then you could possibly do an interim artifact check at various times to prove validity of your measurements instead of a full calibration. That brings you back to is the artifact checks equal to the measurements you are taking or needing? What process and control are you going to use for the artifacts? You could ideally run them as a sub program if conditions are ideal in your setups also with if then statements or scripting to generate the reporting you would like for your process.

I've found this one useful from time to time: http://www.engineersedge.com/

JO's Correct, it depends on the machine. The fanuc's / Makino's have a generic "speed" in their E power library settings you could use to gather a generic time but if you've run wires you surely know it all depends on the machining conditions as to how well it performs. Let alone on those machines you can dial the servo gain up or down to tweek the performance also. If you have an experienced operator you could sit down and guestimate what speeds the different operations run at in the varying thickness and materials then use that to estimate time from the distance of the calculated cut length and number of passes.

Hello Patrik, I'd start with locating your local distributors and look at who's going to support you the best on ALL aspects of your machine purpose. That includes training to applications and tooling to get you up and running. Don't be afraid to ask up front costs on all aspects to what is covered in any service/warranty contracts so you know what your stepping into. Looks like you more or less know what you want to start with for a machine size, how about tooling and accessories? Qty of tools or tool changer (is one necessary) Probing Tool measuring setting/breakage detection coolant/air blast/misting Intelligent control (block look ahead) conversational control (what would you like to do at the control and offline) Networking / file sharing capabilities (most nowadays are quite capable but ask anyway) That's a good start I would think, if you can find someone close by or that is able to cover all of this with you on your purchase and afterwords it's a huge benefit. Good Luck

Zipper, do you mean a 4 axis "No Core" opp? If so I don't see it.

Thanks for the feedback, glad it worked =)

What if you tried "manipulating" the cutter diameters slightly by .001" up and down to create 3 different cutters. Not the true fix but if it works...

Entity association refers to the dependent relationship between one entity and a second entity or group of entities from which the first entity is generated. To understand the relationship between dependent entities, think of the original, or generating, entity or entities as the "parent" and the resultant, or generated, entity as the "child," which depends on the parent for its definition. Entity association occurs between the following entities: Between curve-generated surfaces and their reference curves Between offset surfaces and their generating surfaces Between trimmed surfaces and their generating (base) surfaces Between surface curves and the surfaces on which they lie

The first suggestion I would offer is save the file out with the Zip To Go utility under the help tab and send it in to QC at Mastercam. They can try to reproduce it and let you know if its a bug or not. Or if you can post it to the FTP site here one of the other forum members may be able to open it and see if they have the same issue. Your best bet is to do the Z2G utility and see what QC says.

oops double post sorry.