Yeap that what we are getting all right... we a male and a female trim steel being machined and they look just like that.. a faceted disco-ball! I'll pass that along and see if that helps.. you know if I could get them to hook the NC guy up to the internet he could ask these things himself! LOL

Thanks again Paul. I guess that really proves MY point though. They thought that it was my software not creating them correctly. I showed him your post and the MC9 file. So now he knows what he has to do then! My thing is that when I design a trim steel I must follow the customer part lines faithfully, and I have no room for interpretation. Although I must admit that I do add-lib sometimes when I know I can get away with it! Shhhh Thanks again for all of your help!

Thanks PAul I will hand this off to the NC guy and see if it looks better to him. So what you're saying i take it, is that there really isnt any "setting" that I can tweak, its more of a manual function that needs to be done by the operator. Correct? Thanks again Jon

Ok I have uploaded the SWX document under the path: ftp://mastercam:[email protected]/Ma...lids/243.sldprt let me know if you have any ideas... perhaps this is just some settings I need to address in MC? Thanks again for all your help

Oh and BTW thanks for the welcome!

Yes I can put a solidworks part file up there, It will be there in a few minutes... I will provide a link when I get it there. I dont have access to the mastercam file though.

Yes, Im saving them as native Solidworks documents, sldprt for parts and sldasm's from assemblies... we do have a parasolid translator as well that I know of and I will suggest that they try that... what we are having problems with are the trim steels... we copy the edges of the design part and copy ("convert entities")the edges into a sketch for solidworks to extrude or cut. this leaves a nice smooth looking trimline when viewed in solidworks but after importing to MC they are short lined facted edges and faces.

ToolFab: I am using Solidworks 2004 Sp4.0 And for the4 mastercam I am not sure.. but I know that we use the latest stuff as a rule.. The NC guy is gone for the day so I'll have to ask him tomorrow... Currently we are saving the files as sldprt files... The next thing we will try is the parasolids... Rob: I dont have any way to break a spline into lines and arcs in Solidworks I can go the other way and take lines and arcs to splines just not the other way around... is that a MC command? If so I will have my NC guy look at it...

Has anyone had any experience opening Solidworks files into mastercam directly? Files that contain lines and arc are working fine but anything contains a spline causes problems... the spline gets broken down into very small lines and cause rough "faceted" surfaces, and mating pieces wind up with very poor fitup after machining. Ideas anyone?