We are about to hire a person to set-up/run/operate a 60x30 vmc. We do R/D work so the person needs to be self sufficient and one of the requirements is to have cam experience for they will be required to do there own programming. Now to weed out bull xxxxters i have a written test that i give people now, since we are requiring cam experience this time and some apps. have had mcam experience on them i would like to give a test for that too! Any idea's and thoughts to how tuff or simplified this should be i would like to hear some opinions. Also what should i do for people who have non Mcam experience? The money is 17.00 to 25.00 an/hr which is really good for around here plus the benifits. If anyone might be interested in the local area of columbus ohio the website is www.battelle.org click on job oppertunitys. Thanks, Chad

Do any of you know if there is some kind of polishing process for parts that have a edm sinker finish. I thought i have heard of some electolosis finishing process but i am not sure? Our engineers here dont quite understand edm finishes. They think because it has a burnt finish it doesnt meet there standards per say a mill finish. The material is titanium if that helps any. Any ideas from the experienced people in this forum would greatly be appreciated. Thanks, Chad Fisher

We have 3 of the mini haas's here and they are pretty nice for the small work that we do here the only problem is they lack power on larger cuts. My only issue with them is i think they should of went with a smaller taper than the 40.

Thanks KG, but it didnt seem to work. Ill give this example of what i want to do. Lets take a 1 dia hole, STCW in center, cut dia just short of maybe .04, stop with M0, then finish tab cut then reverse "with out wanting to move back to center" taking skim cut. Is this possible??? Or am i just really blind and missing something? Thanks in advance, Chad

When using mcam wire 9 i use "rough with tab" then skim. My question is how come it wants to go back to the start position after tab cut instead of just reversing. I think in 8 it would do this. My contour is not closed. Any ideas i think i have tried every toggle on the cuts page and no luck. Thanks in advance, Chad

i understand about if you change 1 operation to incremental then the next time it comes up it will be incremental again. Like here is another example, i set screen config page to always use our haas post, well some times when mastercam is started it will say post not found, and when you go to select the post again its name is already selected but it acts if it does not recognize it. So even though it is there you have to go in and re select it. Now........whats up with that?? As i stated earlier there is acouple of different people who use the different computers and 1 computer might be logged on and off up to 20 or more times a day? I dont think that should have anything to do with it, but ya never know. We have 4 different dells all with 2000 pro on them with mcam 9 installed, one of our guys crashed the machine because it defaulted to a retract of .25 incremental and he was z-.75 in the cut so the tool only came to -.5 before it moved in x-y "crash" well when this happened i immediatly got the blame for mcam 9 having problems so i asked him to show me the mc9 file. When i looked at the opperation i seen where the clearence planed was turned off and the retract plane was set incremental. Now i do trust my guy that he wouldnt of changed this to do that "who would crash a machine intentally" so i pointed out what was wrong and to recheck clearence plane and make change to absolute retract. Any way an argument occurred over why it was changing to do this "i dont know cant explaine it" Anyway i setup all the defaults again and did a save as because our reseller told us to do it like that. But why it is changing occasionally i dont know.

one more thing we are using version 9.0sp1 i have not seen any patches unless i have missed them???????

Occasionally we are losing some of our defaults in the configuration of mc9. What i mean by this is in like a contour opperation we have all the clearence/ retract/ top of stock checked and set to absolute numbers i.e clearence 2., retract .25, feed plane .100. Well once in a while it will have the clearence unchecked and retract at incremetal, almost as if you had just done a fresh install of mcam. Is there an explaination of why it does this just once in a while, i could understand if you had to select you cfg every time you started mcam because the systyem would start with fresh defaults all the time but it doesnt. Our computers are all dells with windows 2000 pro and since we have multiple users we have to log on off of the computers all the time. Would this possibly have something to do with this? Any help would greatly be appreaciated, Thanks, Chad

I have done header flanges before and other type of plate work in 1018 steel with the iscars. your running probably hole diameters in the range of 1 3/4 and up. We would use iscars ic328 inserts in the e90a body style of cutter running at 700sfm with .007 ipt with 3 flutes this equaled too 3565 @ f74.8 with depth of cut around .125 deep. But you must run it dry! other wise you get into all of this thermal cracking of the inserts "now it gets over my head" Hope this might help.

Well to answer my own question i didnt have lead in and lead out checked, my morning ignorance prevails again! But why would it have not put any x y movement in the line that i marked??

i have a haas post that our local reseller set up to use the misc values so i could post for different fix offsets. What i do i is on the first op is set it for 54 then copy and paste that opp then set misc value to 55,.............boom posted for two vices, it has worked alright yesterday now when i tried to post, the last opperation was suspose to move to g55 when it got done with 54 but it posted no xy movement. Maybe i am real ignorant here but personal opinion says that for simply posting for more fixture offsets is rather cumbersome. Any ideas would greatly be appreaciated. Thanks in advance (PROGRAM NAME - 51 ) (DATE=DD-MM-YY - 29-10-02 TIME=HH:MM - 07:36 ) N100 G20 N102 G0 G17 G40 G49 G80 G90 ( TOOL - 1 DIA. OFF. - 1 LEN. - 1 DIA. - .15 ) N104 T1 M6 N106 G0 G90 G54 X-3.2 Y.06 S2546 M3 N108 G43 H1 Z2. N110 M8 N112 G54 Z.1 N114 G1 Z-.075 F12. N116 G41 D1 X0. F12.8 N118 G2 X.06 Y0. I0. J-.06 N120 G1 Y-2.25 N122 G2 X0. Y-2.31 I-.06 J0. N124 G1 X-3.2 N126 G2 X-3.26 Y-2.25 I0. J.06 N128 G1 Y0. N130 G2 G40 X-3.2 Y.06 I.06 J0. N132 G0 G54 Z2. N134 G55 "NO MOVEMENT??????????????????????????????????????????????? N136 G55 Z.1 N138 G1 Z-.075 F12. N140 G41 X0. F12.8 N142 G2 X.06 Y0. I0. J-.06 N144 G1 Y-2.25 N146 G2 X0. Y-2.31 I-.06 J0. N148 G1 X-3.2 N150 G2 X-3.26 Y-2.25 I0. J.06 N152 G1 Y0. N154 G2 G40 X-3.2 Y.06 I.06 J0. N156 G0 G55 Z2. N158 M5 N160 G91 G28 Z0. M9 N162 G28 Y0. N164 M30 %

Trust me......................................... it was a golden moment!!!!!

Well to add to this i think i got a pretty good one for e-mail. The place where i work is pretty large, around 3000 plus i think, and we have our own email "outlook". Well one of our practical jokers has only work e-mail and he gets the usual dirty pics sent to him which we all know is a no no for work e-mail. So he got a brain storm idea that he was going to send this "excuse me ladies" jpeg file of a woman with big hooters "bare" to another guy in the shop, well when your ready to send or foward something we have a library of all email address's in the company that you just start typing in a couple lettters of the last name and the possible matches come up, well this is where this guy should of paid a little more attention because he had screwed up and sent it to someone else on campus. Luckily we knew who it was when he came and told us, but we didnt tell him. Oh Boy here we go! So we had another guys wife call in here and complian to him about work ethics and how she was christian like and did not believe in any form of pornography and that she was going to report him to human resouces department. **** was on now! He ended up getting nervous and decided that he better go in and tell the boss what he had done, HA HA, we sceme again, while he is in talking to our boss, i call into boss and tell him that we are playing, but to act serious in the effect that i was my boss's supervisor wanting to have a meeting with that individual and human resource guy. Ha Ha again, he played along and pour ole dean was in such dispair over possibly loosing his job. We let this go on for about three hours "that was the time for the meeting this afternoon" then we finally gave in and told him we were playing. The funny thing is that this guy is normally lazy and slow, well let me tell you, during those three hours i have never seen this man work so hard in the past 6 yrs i have know him. I guess moral of story is pay attention to who you send things too! Oh well what a day to end a work week! Have fun all!

we were just told yesterday that O.T. is unlimited so hello uncle sam, i am ready to bend over and grab my ankles!

This is getting pretty interesting! These are the things the tool salesmen neglect to tell you. We plan to get the machine and i am pleased with the responses i am getting. If by chance you all have some more "do's and don'ts" i would really like to hear them. Thanks so far!

Hey folks, need some help on graphite. We are about to buy a EDM sinker and we are going to move it and a wire edm into a enclosed room of about 20 x 16 with a surface grinder. My question is can you run coolant on graphite if you grind it or does it still get in to the air, should i remove the grinder from the room? Also on machining of graphite what is the best grade to get and how does coolant react while machining and what effects does it have on the machining centers? Most of the time we will try to use copper for making our electrodes. I have never ran a sinker nor do i have experience with graphite so if any of you can give me any pointers i would greatly appreciate it. Thanks in advance, Chad

I have a cat 50 to r8 and even though i have ER40 collets, TG100/150 and DA200 style collets there is time when this tool comes in real handy!

Thanks Gentlemen, that will be my weekend task of updating 5 puters/seats. Have a good weekend!

We are getting ready to update to v9 and would like to keep our posts, is there anything special i have to do? Thanks in advance!

Andris, personally i am a ford guy, but a guy here in the shop wanted to play around with the symbol and throw it on a piece of aluminum. Were not out to make any money on anything were just board here at work and were trying to get into something to make time go faster. I am getting ready to start making a set titanium rods for a 351w to give you an idea of how we play around in here. So if you have that symbol and dont mind giving it up send it to me. Thanks, Chad

By chance could i have someone convert a jpeg image of pontiac firehawk symbol to a mc8 file please? I know there is a converter but i cant justify it for a one time thing and a government job at that. Any help would greatly be appreaciated, Thanks, Chad

just keepin this alive in case someone might of missed it.

We have VF6 50 taper that we got feb, 02 and it has been a real lemon. I think Haas at one time had a 98% up time on there machines or they would pay you for the downtime. They would of lost there butt on our machine. They have already had to replace the transmission for the tool changer because the spindle was loosing its orientation and crashing the arm. Three times they had came out in a two month span to tighten the encoder on the spindle or something. Dah............ if its coming loose i think theres a vibration problem somewhere and its only a 5000 rpm machine. That one finally cost them 6500 for the tranny and who knows how much for labor. Then in one month it went through 2 hydraulic counterbalance cylinders. Our local sales rep is working on extending the warranty for us and there service for our area i would give them 90% rating. We do have a VF2 and 3 mini mills and they have been great. Even with the problems with the VF6 i think i would buy another Haas unless i had a huge bankroll to spend. Maybe an idea to do would be to e-mail this whole thread to someone at Haas to see that this is getting out to people worldwide. I would hope to think that they would try to please a customer instead of having bad PR from them............................just my .02

Jim i sent it to your e-mail. If anyonew else has a problem let me know. I do know netscape will not allow me to get to cadcams site. Also in this file there is different levels for each infividual part and material i used was 17-4 ss so i could surface grind it. Thanks, Chad

If anyone is interested in making there own edm clamps i have posted them on cadcams site. I use these on a daily basis in many different set-ups. I figure they might be useful to someone. Any questions e-mail me or post in this reply. Hopefully the link will take you to them directly. ftp://mastercam:[email protected]/Mastercam_forum/Wire/