Have you tried switchining the Hasp? That's the best I can come up with.

Rick, can't you uncheck it in the operation defaults?

I was thinking of submiting something till I read the fine print. "All videos received become property of In-House Solutions and can be used to our discretion." I've made a few videos to help promote my business. One youtube video has been viewed 29,000 times. I can't afford to make a video for in-house, but I would be happy to allow in-house to use MY video.

I'm not a post guru, but Yes it is possible.

The only "detect flats" feature in Mastercam I can think of was in Surface/Rough/Pocket. If that would work, it wouldn't be difficult to modify a post to only output the z values.

Very impressive. I bet that machine could shake a great martini.

Bill, I feel for you. It's tough out there right now. Try to keep you head up and remember what is important in life. Last week, I didn't turn on a single machine, but there are signs things are slowly turning.

I think it is a post setting.

My shop is dependant on semiconductor work which is dead. I get more phone calls which were mis-dialed than acual business calls.

Colin, Thanks for the response. I hope I understand the answer. The smoothing on Cut-parameters effects both rough passes and passes which touch geometry (finish). The smoothing on the filter page can control rough and finish passes seperately. And if they are both enabled, MC will use the smaller value from whichever tab.

Does anyone know the difference between the "smoothing" on the cut-parameters tab and the "smoothing" on the arc-filters tab?

I'm sorry I can't offer any constructive advice. Just the thought of a hole that deep in inconel gives me chills. All I can say is, good luck with that. I certainly will no-quote that one.

General Plastics sells a foam available in various thickness and densities. Easy to machine, holds detail well and can take paint. If you call them, they can send you samples of the material. I think it's called Last-a-foam.

John, that's what I'm doing, but it seems like there should be an easier way. There is a box to exclude blind holes, it seems that it would make sense to have a box to exclude thru holes, or am I not using this toolpath correctly?

I decided to give FBM drill a try, and it worked well on the first face. When drilling the first side, I limited the hole detection to one plane and MC drilled both the thru holes and the blind holes. Now I flip the part over and want to drill just the bind holes on this face, but I can't figure out how to avoid the existing thru holes which were previously drilled. Sugestions?

I'm glad you got it figured out. The machine shouldn't give you any more trouble as long as you keep it powered on. When you replace the battery, it is not necessary to shut off the power. Just take the old battery out and install the new one with the power on.

The Fanuc cold start proceedure from the manual: Prepare: In MDI mode input G21 to change machine to Metric display. 1.1 Press the MDI push button on the operator panel A. 1.2 Press PROGRAM key one/two times on the MDI panel until PROGRAM (MDI) screen is displayed. 1.3 Press G21 using MDI panel. 1.4 Press EOB key on the MDI panel. 1.5 Press INSERT key. 1.6 Press CYCLE START push button on the operator panel A. 1.7 Make sure the screen is changed to Metric Mode (X***,*** is displayed). 1.8 Press REF RETURN push button on the operator panel A. 1.9 Press Z push button on the operator panel A (Manual Z axis zero return). 1.10 Press X push button on the operator panel A (Manual X axis zero return). 1.11 Press Y push button on the operator panel A (Manual Y axis zero return). 1.12 Preparation is done.

Since the battery is dead and the machine has lost it's reference, I beleive the machine requires you to jog the machine to the axis markers and perform a cold start. After that the machine should run fine unless you turn it off.

Gouge check?

If we are getting rid of features, I would like to nominate the toolpath's-manager red arrow of doom.

I think the reason the first cut, "starts way higher than it needs to", is because there is a surface or solid face bellow the top surface which is within the limits of the "minimum step down" located in the "add cuts" check box. You can fix that by choosing the lower face as the "minimum depth" in the "depth limits".

What are you doing with the pattern? If it's going to be used for a soft investment, there's shrinkage of the rubber, shrinkage of the wax and shrinkage of the cast-metal. I've made patterns as much as 13% oversize.

Extrude/draft

It seems funny it would run for an hour and then give problems, unless the machine is doing something different than it was doing during the first hour. Perhaps it's as simple as the computer going into a sleep mode or the hard drive shutting down. What are the power settings on the computer?

Is your Cplane set to 3D?