Moldmaker74, If you are using negative stock, you would want negative stock on all areas of the electrode, including flats for example. For the flat areas you would typically use HST horizontal to get the best toolpath. You have different fields for xy stock and z stock. It is not possible to put a negative value in any surface toolpath when using a flat bottom tool ( sharp corner ). If you were using a 1/4 bull nose endmill with a .020 rad and your electrode required a .005 spark gap, Mastercam will basically subtract your spark gap from your tool info to calculate the toolpath. So in other words its the same thing as programming a .240 dia tool with a .015 rad and cutting to zero stock to leave. If you try to subtract the spark gap from a sharp corner tool, in essense, you end up with a negative radius which obviously is not possible. What we do on our Makino that we use for electrodes is: If using a sharp corner tool, you define it as a bullnose endmill with its true diameter and the corner rad is whatever the spark gap is. Merely lying about the diameter is not going to help as some others have suggested because that is only compensating in the XY direction. You still cannot leave negative stock in Z with this approach. ( Yes, I know there other ways, but I'm trying to keep it simple )By only lying about the corner rad, you cover all basis and get no errors and correct electrodes. Don't know if I helped or confused you.

The only drawback to using negative stock is when you have to use a sharp corner tool. In this case you must lie about the diameter.

This happens to me in lathe when I have several tools in my library that have the same tool number. For me it is just a warning that I may have chosen the wrong tool.

Tool comp is handled "in computer" for our lathe.

Quote: The toolpath are the same except the filter on the makino toolpaths is turned off since the machine doesn't use arcs I don't understand this comment. We have two Makino S56's and two V56's and we use arc filtering on all of them.

Dragracer1951, To create surfaces from your solid model: Create/ surfaces from solid/ then select solids icon and then toggle to solid body. Select your solid and accept.

Use the horizontal finishing from the HST toolpaths. This gives you way more control and options for flat finishing. In surface contour, hit the detect flats button and also check the adjust stock to leave on drive surfaces. The toolpath will only cut the flats to zero if you have specified the stock to leave at zero. Go the high speed route. It is the best solution.

The cost for that computer was ..... get ready ....... $8600 Canadian including tax. First place is expensive. I think that works out to exactly $2000 a minute. Pathetic at best.

posted February 06, 2008 11:30 Dell precision XN T7400 8GB DDR2 SDRAM 3.2 GHZ QUAD CORE NVIDIA QUADRO FX 4600 160 SATA 10K XP PRO X64 4MIN 15 SEC This is the fastest of the bunch so far.

Our engineers use ProE and hate it. Way too complicated for general stuff, however, it is very powerful for assemblies and a few other functions. Technical support is almost non-existent.

Mark Baker, It is finally nice to see someone fron CNC Software chime in on some of these issues and suggestions and actually take your valued customers seriously. I have a hard time believing with CNC Softwares resources that you would not already own a copy of your closest competitions software for comparison. If you check one of my post from last year, that is actually what I personally spent almost 9 month of my time doing. Comparing different packages to find a better way. Search for " High end cam packages " for this thread as it contains some valuable info. I stopped reporting my findings as I felt it would be too detrimental to CNC Software. If you contact me directly, I would be more than willing to share my insight with you. Carmen Goudey CNC Operations Manager

Quote: Because our package doesn't have solids, I change everything to surfaces so I can work with them. You don't need solids add-on to work with solids. Use the WCS on the solid and you can program the solid just like you program with surfaces. You cannot translate the solid without the add-on so that is why you use the WCS.

Check your back-up files if you have enabled this function rather than autosave. This should minimize your rework time. I have only had this problem in lathe but also have not seen it recently.

Create-curve-slice from solid body works the best for us. Just make sure that you are creating your slice cross section through an area that gives you the full cross section. In other words watch out for drilled holes, flats, dowels hole, etc that will affect the cross section. Sometimes we have to create a wcs that is rotated so that we get the true section as you cannot rotate your solid unless you have solids add-on.

Suks2bu, Those pockets must be deep. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Use the high speed toolpath area clearance. It will be the best and gives you more options for tool control.

I'd much rather have seen Kathy's tattoo.

When you open a parasolid file in Mastercam, it is automatically converted to Mastercam's proprietary format. You should be able to create toolpaths immediately. My only guess is that your parasolid file must be huge. Your hardware seems to be more than sufficient. I assume you mean 15 minutes to post toolpaths? If so, it could take that long but only if you had an enormous toolpath with no filtering applied.

Colin Gilchrist, Many times I feel like we are all Beta testers. Would I be interested in being a Beta tester and going through all the difficulties of developing a new release ? No. To the best of my knowledge, the Beta guys still have to pay for their software just like the rest of us on maintenance. The only difference is they get to preview what we will be fighting with in the near future. What really gets me boiling is when I see the production candidate released and it contains so many basic problems that should easily have been picked up by the quality control people, or, the release still contains all of the bugs from the previous release. What kills me is that all of the major releases are marketed or timed to coincide with the tool shows and such to show off their new product and try to generate new sales. In my opinion, you have a lot more to lose than you will gain with this approach. For example, lets say Mastercam X4 is released at the Toronto Manufacturing Show and lots of people stop by the booth. Ok, you might generate a handful of sales from the show. Nothing that will make or break your business. On the other hand, releasing a product full of bugs and pre-existing problems to your core legacy users by rushing it to market, you run the risk of losing these users out of sheer frustration to the competition. Let me say this last thing. Mastercam sells software, however WE are the end users. Instead of development being driven by marketing and what they think might be a good idea to incorporate into the next release, why not ask your customers what they want to see or what is important to them? Collectively, we all have a lot to say with many different levels of experience. More so than the decision makers who develop our end product.

andrewgore: Excellent points. 80000 seats installed worldwide. Where the h--- is the quality control and development. Way too slow, behind other systems, too many problems.

Ployd, I tried to do a print screen and paste it here for you to see but I am not skilled at doing this. First, use a 1 inch ball end mill and create a high speed raster toolpath leaving .4 for your stock to leave. This toolpath is merely for calculation purposes for your second toolpath. The first toolpath, if you were to use it, would give you approximatley what you already have as stock. Now create a new high speed rest roughing toolpath with lets say a 1/2 inch ball endmill. In parameters, rest material, choose: one other operation, then select the first toolpath from the list on the right. Choose your stock to leave ( maybe .01 ? ) stepdown, stepover, etc. and Mastercam will only cut the remaining material. The resulting toolpath uses pocketing and contouring techniques in order to cut only the remaining stock.

Bob Heininger and Toolman 184: I couldn't agree more. Fix all the bugs, then move on.

Write a raster toolpath that leaves .4 stock on the part. Now do a remachining toolpath that references the first toolpath and there you have it. The other option as described above using an stl file works great as well. Either way will get you where you are looking to go.

Recently, someone from CNC Software posted a thread requesting lathe users to post what they would like to see in future releases of lathe. I thought it would be a good idea to compile a list of suggestions for mill users. Some of the things I would like to see are: A huge improvement in processing speed. Other cam sytems completely blow Mastercams doors off in this regard. 2D corner rounding ( filleting of toolpath ) just like you have in the highspeed toolpaths. I would like to be able to add corner rounding on a 2D contour toolpath without generating new geometry or filleting an internal corner by modifying geometry. I remember a Deckel control used to be able to due this with just a g-code. This is very important for high speed machining. Improve the highspeed toolpaths so that a toolpath like pencil will climb mill the part with no exceptions. I'm sure there are a lot of things that all of the other experienced users out there would love to see also. Add to this thread and you just never know. Maybe someone from CNC Software might actually run with it.

Supposedly the service pack fixes that problem. X2 MR2 SP1.