If I drill over a hundred 3/16 dia holes 2 inches deep with G83 and now I come back with a longer drill and want to rapid to Z-1.9 and start pecking every .050 but retract to Z.1 after each peck. 1st question - G83 can not do that right?(fanuc control on a Mori vmc) Please correct me if I am wrong on this. 2nd question - If G83 won't do it, can I change something to have mastercam output the code long hand. How can I accomplish this? I don't need the exact details right now, just need to have a basic idea of what needs to be done for now.

I don't know what all the fuss is about reference points on the lathe side. I have done a couple hundred programs between X2 and X3 and only needed reference points twice. In both cases it was a boring bar making a rapid move, through the part to the tool change position, directly from the back of the bore. I never could figure out what was causing it. It was clearly visible in back plot so I used reference points to pull out first.

The belt or disc skimmers only work well when they are new for some reason. +1000 on the Zebra skimmerators! These work very well once you know how to use them. Get one for each machine and don't move them around. I skim for 24 hours and then turn it off for the next 24 hours to let the oil float to the top. Do this for a week or so before you open the valve to let the oil drain off. You need at least a half inch of oil floating on top before you let it drain off otherwise you will be throwing away coolant.

Thanks for a starting point Jack. Thats all I was really looking for. I am actually familiar with speed and feed calculations for many materials including some of the exotics in 2D applications. I just don't have much hands on cutting experience using ball end mills and surface tool paths. I have only done it 3 or 4 times, one piece each time. Do you still think it would be better to rough out the shape I described with a smaller bull nose end mill? What diameter would you try?

Well its just a shallow concave surface on the top of a flat block, kind of like the egg shape lens from a pair of eyeglasses. Thats why I was thinking of a ball end mill to rough it out. Its about 1-1/2 wide x 2-1/2 long x .5 deep cavity. Has to be done on a 3-axis vmc for now.

A little help with speeds and feeds for ball endmills. What do some of you recommend for speeds and feeds for a 1/2 diameter solid carbide 2 flute ball end mill roughing 1018 cold rolled steel. DOC, RPM, Feed rate? What is a good rule of thumb for this.

Yes, you are correct. That is another thing that will prevent the circles from highlighting. If you turned on "active grid" the circles will not highlight. You can still turn on "visible grid" and the circles will still highlight.

Yep, just select all operations and regenerate them even if they don't need it. This will show the tools the proper length in verify.

There are two possibilities why your circles may not be highlighting. 1.) Auto highlight should be on by default. You can find it up in the main menu by clicking on Settings/Configuration/Screen. In here there is a check box for "auto highlight" and "solids by faces". They should both have a green check mark. 2.) When you go back to your create line endpoint command make sure that the tangent icon in the ribbon bar is on. On some computers it is difficult to tell if the icon is on or not. You have to look closely. It is on when it looks like it is pressed in. On some computers it turns a blue color which is easier to see.

In my experience it is safer to use M71 through M76 to change the pallet on a six pallet changer. I had some operators that saw me use M911 one time (I was a service engineer for Mazak a long time ago). A couple weeks later they called saying their machine was sometimes going to X- instead of X+ even though the program had positive numbers. I was there watching them for 2 days with no problems. On the 3rd day I saw the operator key in M911 to make the pallet change. It didn't change the pallet so he keyed it in again and it changed the pallet. I asked him why he was using that command and he said he saw me do it when I installed the machine. When he hit cycle start the machine went in the opposite direction. I knew right away what the problem was.......Mirror image was getting activated b/c when he typed M911 the second 1 didn't take so he was actually keying in M91 (mirror image on). Luckily the error caused them to cut air but it could have just as easily been a major crash.

This happened to me yeseterday with X2. I had an X2 mcx file with holes in a square pattern. I saved it out as a dxf but my guy told me when he opened it in Autocad the top row of holes were missing. I opened the dxf file in X2 and they were missing there too. Blank paper space was no help. Levels no help. Used analyze entity properties thinking I might have to use "combine views" but they were all view 1. Then while still in analyze I noticed some of the circles had a start angle of 180 and an ending angle of -180. Other holes said start at 90, end at 450??? So I changed the 180/-180 holes to start at 0, end at 360. Then I saved it out as a dxf and I was able to see all the holes in autcad and in X2 when I opened the dxf file. Later that day I decided to try the whole thing again with X3MU1. It worked on the first try and I didn't have to change the goofy starting and ending angles.

Standard drill point angles in the US are 118 and 135 most commonly. I like to use 120 spot drills and then drill with 118 drills.

Looks like all the 2d path is there. I tried lathe rough, quick rough, and canned rough. All three posted g-code. I was still able to chain and tool path a solid too.

I had the reset button get stuck on me once. Fanuc service found it. They had to replace the board.

For one thing, entry doesn't have verify. It only has backplot. Can't create surfaces is another limitation. No C or Y axis either.

+1000 on Thinbit. They will also make them out of carbide or HSS.

I think the G83 canned cycle can only be used on the live rotary c-axis type drilling. For a non-rotating drill I have used the G74 peck face grooving cycle by just leaving out the step over call out on the G74 line.

Welcome to the forum Stuart. Like I said on the phone there are some long time users here that should be able to help answer your questions about STL files. Answers might be a little slow coming as it is the weekend. If this thread gets too far down the list just reply to it typing in bump to bump it back up near the top of the list.

XP Pro - 32 bit

Thursday night when I left work I did a shut down and the PC said installing updates, do not turn off your computer. When it was done I turned off the monitor and went home. Friday morning the PC won't start The windows loading screen comes up but that is as far as it gets. Did a hard reset and same thing. Turns out the update corrupted one of the hard drives in the raid arrangement. Luckily there wasn't anything on the raid yet. Took out the bad hard drive and she came back up. Did anyone else have any problems with this last Windows update?

Hmmm, can't reproduce the other problem here on my home computer. I'll have to try it again at work on Monday.

Found it. I was in contour with leadin/leadout turned off. I was using 2d ramp and linearize helixes was checked to on. I do have another one for a standard pocket operation that shows chopping the corners. I'll play with the STL tolerance and I will see if I can post a picture.

I find myself searching for that thread once or twice a week. Its interesting to me.

Roll around corners is the default for contour. In X2/MR2 Verify would show the corners square as it should and the machine would still cut nice square corners. In X3/MU1 verify shows the corners kind of chopped off. I have been turning off roll around corners so verify looks good. Is this just a verify problem or will it really output g-code to cut the corners off? I haven't had time to experiment with this. (edit) Back plot in top view with quick verify on shows clean square corners. Its just verify that shows the corners chopped off for me.

Another tip for back plotting. Back plot can look really messed up depending on where the little red arrow is located. If you want to back plot operations for both sides of the part I find that back plot looks much better if you move the little red arrow above the stock flip operation first. Otherwise if the red arrow is at the bottom of the ops manager the screen shows geometry for the second side and starts showing the tool path for the first side.