Does anyone have a use for some manuals for a Mazak VQC 20/40A? If so, send me an e-mail [email protected] I'm in Australia and we have four spare sets of manuals.

Thanks Andy, Thanks Chris, your input is much appreciated. My biggest problem is that my job requires me to do too many different things at the moment. This afternoon and tomorrow afternoon I have a welding student lab to run that takes all afternoon. I was going to spend most of this morning preparing some more weld pieces but got dragged off to get a thermo lab going and so it goes on. I'll be lucky if I get back to this job until Thursday. Makes it hard to become familiar with any system. It's taken me over three hours of interruptions to finish this message. Cheerio, Hugh.

OK, I have selected Disable Stock Recognition and got the two ops to behave the same. I think I prefer OP#3. Now I'll have a crack at finishing the front and then try to groove out the bit behind the ball. I'm a bit disappointed at how many tricks I seem to have to learn to make it work. It really doesn't seem to be very intuitive. Is V9 any better? Thanks again for helping. Cheerio, Hugh.

Thanks for more help, guys. I'll try some more on Monday. Have a good weekend. Cheerio, Hugh.

Thanks for your time Andy. I did as you suggested. Op. 1 Having reversed the chaining direction, I now just get an approach to Z0.200, D-6.600, and a retract at Z0.200 to D55.883. That's all. Op 2 As you said it looks OK. The trick to this is that Op 1 & 2 were created one after the other with the chaining for Op 2 coming from "last" after chaining for Op 2. I'm fairly sure that otherwise the two Ops were created identically. Why the difference? Op 3 Changed the tool comp to right, now the tool approaches to Z-24.4, plunges in to D67.400 and turns to Z-34.400. That's all. I couldn't find where to disable stock definition. Then I found Disable Stock Recognition in the Stock Recognition pull down and it works well. Can you explain the stock recognition caper to me so I can logically remember it next time? When and why do you have to disable it? I'll be interested to see if it's disabled in Demo when I get home. I guess I'm getting there but it's not too smooth and I've got a bit to go yet. Thanks for your reply, I'm going home now, will try some more on Monday. Thanks again for you input, Cheerio, Hugh.

OK, I managed to get it onto the FTP site. Thanks Jay. It's called Sphere R69.MC8 and it's in the Lath folder. If anyone would like to backplot the three operations and tell me what I'm doing wrong and particularly why the first two are different I'd be very happy to hear from you. Right now it's Friday afternoon and I'll be going home in a couple of hours. I am going away for the weekend where there is no PC (or TV either) so I can reply tonight at home but after that it'll be Monday. Thanks, Hugh.

Thanks for all your replies guys. I have just got in and am about to have another go. What strikes me as strange is that I didn't have any problems like this (well, I don't remember having....) with the last job and it worked straight off on V8 demo at home. Keith, I am using Quick Rough and following ,more or less, the V8 lathe tutorial book. I will look at the tool set up. Could it be better set up in Demo? The chain is just one quadrant. I'm surprised at how different Lathe is. Bucket, the big problem is that there are so many different aspects to my job that I can't use it every day. My Dad used to have a saying "a Jack of all trades is a master of none". Sadly, it's true. (No offense to Jack....). I did practice last night with Demo and it worked perfectly....straight off. Chris, I will have a fiddle with overlap as well and try adding the line. I'll have a crack at posting it to the FTP too. For some reason I have a bit of trouble doing that. Must be that old computer illiteracy rearing it's ugly head again! Thanks all, much appreciated. Cheerio, Hugh. [ 03-20-2003, 06:33 PM: Message edited by: Hugh.Venables ]

Thanks for your encouragement Jeff, at the moment I really need it. Any suggestions as to what settings could cause a problem like this? I have to do the job but there is a limit to how many days I can go on achieving zero! Hugh.

I had a really frustrating day today trying to do my second MC lathe job. The first (a toroid/donut which worked well) was before Christmas, so I admit my learning curve is a bit shallow. The first operation consists of a 34.5 m.m. spherical radius on the end of a dia. 70 m.m. round bar. I couldn't get anything remotely resembling a sensible tool path. Sometimes the tool headed straight for the radius centre and other times it would just do a small gouge where the radius blends with the cylinder. There was always a tool collision warning. I started from scratch and redrew it, same problem. When I use fit to screen I find there is what appears to be an extra stock definition to the Z+ of the job in the shape of a big cylinder with a small bore which is on many (every?) level(s) and which I can't delete. Tonight I tried the job at home on V8 Demo and it worked fine. Could I have overlooked a default at work? Or have I got a problem with the PC or V8.1.1? Any ideas? Thanks, Hugh.

Russ, As Jack said you could try a search of this forum as there has been some discussion about Camaix's Mazatrol post for Mastercam. Some of the questions came from me as I was interested in how useful it might be in an environment where there is some manual Mazatrol programming and some Mastercam generated EIA/ISO programs run on the Mazak (a 15 YO or so VQC20/40A). I didn't get enough enthusiastic response to inspire me to give it a go so I can't help you much. I do remember something in the discussion that left me witth the impression that English translation of the product may not be quite as extensive as everyone would like. I would still like to hear more about it, so if you could find the time to let us know how you go that would be much appreciated. There are quite a lot of Mazak users on this forum. Slick, Camaix is a German company that I think is a Mastercam reseller. They have written a Mastercam post processor that outputs in Mazatrol, Mazak's excellent conversational language that is so good it has changed little since introduction 20+ years ago. It would be a great idea for a shop sending Mastercam files to experienced Mazatrol operators as Mazatrol is far,far quicker and easier to edit than EIA/ISO (G-code). Cheerio, Hugh

Thanks for your continued input on this guys. Ezra, I will have a crack at trying your prompts, the trouble is I did the job quick and dirty and it's hard to find the time to go back and spend some more time on it. Got a few other fires to put out. ---Our CNC mill is only 3 axis so it was easier to get 6° tilt on a universal head manual mill. What I needed to toolpath was a 1.5 m.m. chamfer around the outside and a 0.7m.m. on the inside, particularly the inside where the cavity meets the top horizontal and 6° surfaces. ---This is probably a silly question, but how do I tell whether I've got solids? Come to that, I often see discussion of different levels of Mastercam on this forum and I'm not sure where I am there either. ---The height is 12m.m. Would you believe about half the 16 pieces were supplied at 12.1m.m. and the rest at 11.8 m.m. Of course I never thought to check. Cheerio, Hugh.

Thanks for your input Jay,Ezra,Scott. Looks like I'd better learn some solids. Hugh

Chris, no offence taken or even suspected. Hugh.

The file is in the FTP site. It is called FULLBRIDGECOVER-SHORT.MC8 . It hasn't ended up in the MC8 folder but is in the Mastercam parent directory. Hugh.

Thanks Allan. F5 doesn't do anything (Netscape?), clicking "reload" does a great job..........of reloading the blank page! Not sure how to change the time out time in the browser. I think I'd better have a word to the people here who look after our internet connection. Cheerio, Hugh.

Thanks Jay. I couldn't open your site properly either but managed to write down an email address and have sent the file to it. It is in quick and dirty form which can be shown by comparing the job width in level 2 (2-D) and level 4 (3-D by rotating entities in side Cplane). I'm going home, back in about 15 hours or so. Cheerio, Hugh.

Thanks Jay, I could get to the site but couldn't find the instructions. I think I have remembered. I opened the FTP site and Windows Explorer and dragged the file across to the FTP window. A window appeared asking if I wanted to upload the file and I clicked OK but I can't find the uploaded file on the FTP site. It is called FULL BRIDGE COVER-SHORT.MC8 . If I click on your email icon to email you I just get (another!) blank screen. Maybe I should just give up and go home! I think I've run out of time. I'll have to do it quick and dirty again. Hugh. [ 02-11-2003, 10:06 PM: Message edited by: Hugh.Venables ]

Thanks for the offer Scott. I don't put stuff on FTP sites often enough to be able to remember how to do it. Right now, if I click on Ftp Upload Instructions at the top of this page I get up a page headed FTP Instructions but there are no instructions that I can see. I've done it once before and don't recall having this problem........ The University has just installed Solid Edge all over the place so I can probably expect some Solid Edge jobs to come in. I am going to do a two day crash course on it next week. They may try to push their own CAM package. I might need some Mastercam ammunition. I don't really want to change. This forum is too good. Hugh [ 02-11-2003, 07:43 PM: Message edited by: Hugh.Venables ]

Just a totally blank white screen with "document done" at the bottom and the rotating symbol at the top right corner has finished rotating. Well, not totally blank. The Netscape toolbar (?) is still there. Hugh. [ 02-11-2003, 08:32 PM: Message edited by: Hugh.Venables ]

Thanks Matt. Create, Curve, Project prompts for "select surfaces". There are no surfaces, just 2-D entities. I haven't done much surface work. Could you tell me a bit more please. Also, what is the purpose of the flat boundary? Hugh.

Thanks Chris. If I could have managed to get the search page to come up I wouldn't have made such a silly comment. I just tried again to show someone else the problem. From 5 tries I got 4 blank screens and success once. Still don't know what the problem is. Hugh.

I am working on a job that looks a bit like the roof of a house with some vertical walled pockets in it. I want to chamfer the top edges of the pockets. The original geometry is 2-D entities. Last time I did it I created a line down the ridge, broke the entities that crossed it, picked the ones I wanted in isometric view and rotated them in end Cplane. Chaining them in top Cplane produced a 3-D chamfer but not an accurate one because the rotations bought the entities closer to the rotation line (in top view) and the resulting chamfer width varied a bit from the ends to the sides. As the "roof" angle was only 6° and the pockets were narrow, it wasn't very noticable but I'd like to improve it. Can I project the entities onto an angled Cplane? I can get the angled Cplane OK but can't see a way of projecting the entities onto it. Still using V8.1.1 Thanks, Hugh. [ 02-11-2003, 06:03 AM: Message edited by: Hugh.Venables ]

Thanks James, I'm still getting a blank page from clicking "search" at the top of this page. Not sure what to do about this. I presume from what you say that we can only search the topic, not inside the message. So in the case of the "hardware" search, if someone put up a topic of "Help" which led to some useful hardware discussion the information could not be searched for. Am I right? Thanks for the link to the hardware recommendations. It's amazing what's around that a bloke never knows about. Cheerio, Hugh.

I would like to be more successful at searching the Forum. My first problem is when I click on search the result is a completely blank page with "document done" at the bottom of the page just to rub it in. Is this just me? Any ideas? It hasn't always been like this, at times I have been able to search. But I'm not sure what can be searched for. Can I search just for subject (topic) or can I search for something in the message. I presume I would have to match the subject with my search and would like to point out that as a subject "Help" is not very useful. There has been lots of useful discussion on computer specifications for successful Mastercam use but I doubt that I could find many of them which is a shame because I should probably be thinking about a new computer. Somewhere on the forum where computer dummies like me could go to for current hardware/software recommendations would be very useful. Thanks, Hugh.

Thanks Jim. Cheerio, Hugh.