Why not change the rotation of the spindle so that all the machines turn in the same direction. On 3 phase motors it is as simple as switching two legs. Anyone with the smallest electrical knowlage could do it in one minute.

There once was a flamer named Jack, Who never showed anyone slack. Till the night he got drunk, And said all this junk. Now he wishes he could take it all back. Jack, You definitely make an impact on this message board.

If this is something you do all the time,it seems as though you could create a new "M00" drill cycle easy enough. Otherwise I would use a regular G81 drill cycle with a long dwell at the bottom. When the pin gets to the desired position, you could manually stop the machine.

Paul, I had a similar problem with a Supermax, CNC retrofit. 30 taper, knee style mill. I was never able to fix the problem. I tried new spindle bearings and adjusted everything. Once I had the factory out to look at, but they didn't do anything more than I did. In the end, I learned to live with the problem by using roughers whenever possible. I also had good luck with high spiral endmills. I hope you have better luck than I did. 20 years later I still have the machine and use it on occasion for quick drilling or milling operations. Wow, where does the time go. If you solve the problem, would you let me know what it was.

I'm one of those low balling shops. There has been very little work in my area for a long time now. I hate to take someones job or see anyone laid off, but as self employed, I can't collect unemployment. All I can do watch, wait and try to pay the bills.

I am in the process of machining a pattern for an investment casting. This pattern will be used to create a silicone mold. Then wax will be poured into the silicone mold. When melted, the wax pattern will create a void in a ceramic type material and molten brass will be poured in its place. Pretty common investment process. Question is, how much shrinkage is likely to occur? The foundry I am going to is sort of a Mickey Mouse outfit, but beggars can't be choosers. They recommend making the pattern 8% larger for shrinkage. This sounds like an awful lot. Has anyone had any experience in this type of stuff?

Its been a crazy playoff so far. Who could have thought Farve could loose on the tundra, that a Giant's holder has no idea what to do with a bad snap or the Jets could soar. We all knew the Browns could find a way As a Patriots fan, I saw first hand how good the Jets can be. They kicked our a$$, week 15, in our own house. Still, I'm just happy to knock Miami out of the playoffs, week 16.

I don't know what to think by the lack of reply to this question. The machine is fairly popular in my area, but I don't know anyone using MC to program this control. I thought I remembered seeing a generic post way back, perhaps as early as V4, but I checked all of the CDs that I have and don't see that post on the V6, V7 or V8 disk. Was I dreaming?

would work best with a Hardinge CHNC lathe equipt with a General Numeric/Siemens control. In reading the machine's manual, it is kinda funky. Thanks for your help

I generally stay away from these heated topics but I thought I'd add my .02. James’ analogy, "Hey, my car needs gas too?" is off base. When a problem is brought forth to the manufacturers, they often recall the cars, rather than the dealers getting rich from the mistake. Not so with MC. While I agree that the post-master deserves to make the living, I remember when I bought my first seat 10 years ago. The post I was using was riddled with problems. The post needed "fix-n" not "customizing". The post-manual is not a how-to book, rather a reference manual, I was in way over my head and my dealer was good enough to help me iron out the bugs for free. A few years later, I took a post class, and can now "customize" or "modify" with some success.

Sometimes the "output NCI order" button sticks and you must exit to the operations-manager and re-enter to the transform parameters page.

Ron, if you Email your code, I could try it on my Fadal and see if it runs ok. I know these things can get frustrating.

The invert-a-bolt site is has some nice animation, but I don't understand how it applying downward force. It appears to me that the part is still able to move laterally by the amount of thread clearance and could potentially suspend the stock above the level of the table.

Roger, I never saw the "roll" button before. Worked great. Thanks

Any suggestions for an easy way to get text on a radius? Not on an arc, but onto a cylinder. Using project causes some distortion. The text revolves around 180 degrees.

There exists a "first peck" and "subsequent peck" dialog box. Is it possible that the "subsequent peck" box is fighting you?

Hey Zero, That worked slick. Thanks for your help

To give better understanding, I uploaded a file "engrave.jpg" to the ftp ftp://www.ppcadcam.com/Mastercam_forum/solids/engrave.jpg

I can machine what I want, but I'm still kinda new to solids V8 and have a problem creating my geometry. I was wondering if someone could offer some suggestions. What I wish to do is engrave a sphere. I can accomplish this by creating a solid sphere, create a surface from the solid, offset the surface inward and machine that surface using the boundary that I want to engrave. Doing that will produce the desired result, but I want to see it as a solid rather than in verify. Any thoughts?

I had the same problem with dwell times. I fixed it by using seconds rather than miliseconds. Now I enter a dwell of .5 for one-half-second. Needed to mofify the postprocessor to get the right output (muliseconds)by multiplying dwell time. But I am also curious what other fixes may have been.

If I understand the problem, converting the file does not create points and you need to manually create them. If a spline exists around the top and or bottom of the hole, you could try to convert the splines to an arc. (Modify - convert to arcs) And then use the Chook drillpt.dll to create points in the center of each arc.

Both Corel and Illistrator allow text to follow a contour. The contour can be easily created or imported, and the text can be exported as a DXF

While both miss values and mis reals are the same thing. In general, reals are used to insert a value, (eg. mr1=.250) where as integers are used more for turning things on and off, or argument statements within the post (eg. If mi2=1, pcool)

FYI...Illistrator is able to save as DXF

Perhaps another way would be to use "positive aproach" (my control M46). While the machine goes into position, the area would have sufficent time to be flooded