In a different student shop I've run some Milltronics CNCs, posting the program usually presents a dialog box "Errors detected during posting!". But ignoring that and running the program works just fine... Whether or not you want to take that risk with your part is up to you!

If I have my program loaded and I want to do a dry run, ie... > AU,,,1 or 2 or 3, will it run everything at the correct depths (in which case I'll just have to set my tools high) or will they be run above the part?

quote: example .500 3flt 1.25loc 30000rpm 400ipm 1.0doc .05radial. No freakin way!

quote: I don't recall your exact situation, but in this year, was it a year of 50-58 hours per week making parts at a shop or a 40 hour per week doing misc shop tasks (sawing stock, adding coolant to the machines, being the gopher?)Bahhh fine. Half a year then if you want to go like that. Bout 15 hours a week paid at work, 15 hours a week unpaid machining stuff for this FSAE car we're building, since no one else can machine worth a damn. I make the parts though. Get a print...get the stock, either run it manually or program it, set the machine, and run it. Tryin my best guys. On top of a full load of classes and teaching a Solidworks lab.

Thanks folks. Yea Tau, I've been using ME Consultant. Pretty damn nifty! But there's only an option for a generic "carbide" material, not uncoated vs TiN vs TiCN vs TiAlN, etc.

All this is just side work, folks. Stuff during the school year for some extra cash. Still have 2-3 years left at the university. I'm just trying to see what I should be making given what I'm currently doing. This summer I'm trying for some sort of engineering internship in design (at Lockheed, Boeing, Ball Aerospace, etc), and I plan to get my masters in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis in design and applied mechanics. That's where I intend to push my career. But I also enjoy machining and want to get a hands-on grasp for design for manufacturability. If I can get myself some work this summer at a shop, I'd gladly do that as well. Seems the going rate is about the same for a standard undergraduate engineering internship ($12-16/hr).

Oh I fully intend on sticking around where I'm at while I finish up my degree, with a BS/MS in 2008. By that time I should have 4 years experience. I just wanted to get a feel for what kind of pay I should be expecting. Bout once a year I go in and talk to the director of engineer about work/salary concerns, and I wanted to be well-armed

Where I work, I started off doing lame work for peanuts salary, cleaning and assembling flight payloads, assorted BS. But since then I managed to get to work in the machine shop. By the time the summer rolls around I'll have about a year's shop experience under my belt. I have a good grasp on Mill 9.1 lvl3, have programmed and run manual mills as well as 2 and 3 axis CNC, little work on Hardinge HLVs, can read G-code, can read engineering prints with GD&T, and can do all sorts of parametric solid modelling in Solidworks and Inventor. So I'm wondering what an appropriate pay rate is. I'm thinking its more than what I'm making now...

"Best thing you could do is follow the tool manufacturer's recommendations, starting at the low end parameters and experimenting." I'd love to follow the tool manufacturer's reccomendations, but where the blazes do I find this sort of literature? Will they come with my tools? I can't even find Accupro's website. Looked at Metal Removal, couldn't find reccomended speed and chipload data. Same with Sandvik. Maybe I'm just blind...

And what kind of speed increase can you run with a coated carbide tool?

So today was very exciting. I ordered my first set of cutting tools! Figured it would be nice to have my own rather than use the kinda crappy ones that have been sitting around the cabinets at work for years (we took over a student shop...eeek). And it beats having to constantly borrow good ones from the machinists I know. Cut a lot of wrought aluminum alloy, some 4130 steel, some stainless steel, some engineering plastics. Do some manual work, and some CNC. So I went with .125, .250, and .375 flat EMs, 3 flute, centercut, solid carbide TiCN coated. And a .500 flat cc EM, M42 bright finish (though I regret not having gone with TiCN on that too, oh well). ANYWAY. Saw in another thread some issues about thermal shock on C-2 and resultant shortening of tool life. For manual and 2-axis CNC work I only get up to about 2000rpm and 10ipm, and dab a bunch of A9 or Boellube on my workpiece. The 3-axis stuff I do only gets up to 5000 rpm and maybe 25ipm. So its not like I'm doing HSM and ripping through material. So at those relatively low speeds and feeds is it fine just to flood the hell out of my work, as I typically do?

Yea I'd just go with a standard countour at the diameter you want. Set the lead in/out to 120 degrees or so and long enough to get through the center of the hole you're dropping in.

"This is only an observation and a logical one at that but if it's taking this long to get "X" to market it must be terribly buggy." I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that with previous versions they were building on the same DOS kernel. If you're switching your whole software architecture to purely Windows based there is a LOT of changing and QA to do.

That's still not going to do it, Jack. Those settings just change how dimensions are displayed to the user, not stored within the software and exported. For example, I did this real quick... Drew a circle with a random diameter. Had all my precision settings to 2 decimal places. As you can see, if I dimension it after the fact , it will show the diameter as 3.01 even, but in reality that's not what it is. And if I save it as a dxf and bring it into MasterCAM and analyze it, it verifies that fact. Jack may have a point though. What could be the problem is that your design engineer is throwing down sketches that *look* right where they should be, dimensioning them at low-displayed precision, and think they're exact. In which case upping the number of displayed decimals will show him that they're off. But changing those "precision" values doesn't make the Solidworks model itself any more accurate. What I find interesting is that for an equally spaced feature pattern things are coming out poorly. Probably should have modelled it with a circular pattern, with "equally spaced" checked. In which case those angles should be right on the money. Mike do you happen to have the files so I could take a look at them? The MasterCAM file, print, and ideally SolidWorks model as well? Whatever this guy is doing is a newbie mistake I think. I teach a 4-hour-a-week Solidworks lab in the ME department

I dont think that will do it. That will change how many decimal places the dimensions are displayed at. The *actual model* dimensions are different. How off are your parts, Mike?

Jersey rocks. Grew up in Monmouth county, lot of my family is in Linden and Cartaret. Id imagine Marlton is somewhere up north. I dont suppose anyone has some handy before-after shots of how nice a job these things do? Do you just run em all over the surface of the part?

Interesting. So what kind of toolpath do you run with these brushes? To debur and break edges usually we just run a chamfermill around the edges bout .007 wide.

Purely programming? Drop me an email (you can through this forum).

I had no idea this option existed. What is it, you take some NC file and turn it back into a toolpath?

Wow. Hope it kicks xxxx

"It will be available as soon as its done" Given that they're implementing a whole new kernel I'm glad theyre taking their time to iron out the problems.

quote: All the wireframe toolpaths produce just G1's.What do you mean by this? Mine have plenty of arcs and complex moves (if I specify that kind of pocketing toolpath).

quote: How does someone quote and design parts at competitive pricing who is thinking "old school" and make any money?Well we do very little outside work. Small shop for a small NASA research facility that does payload product development. Don't get me wrong. He's got loads of experience, which is very helpful for some of the crazy designs these guys throw our way. But on the other hand I think he's a bit set in his ways. quote: I think a '99 machine, well which control do you have? 32MP?Marked on the controller is "CNC 88HS". If that means anything to you. Definately nothing too modern.

I'm wondering how important graphics cards are to CAM. For a game, sure. You have complex lighting, tons of objects, vertex and pixel shaders, and all sorts of stuff going on. If you're drawing one object, even if its fairly complex, I wouldn't think it would eat up that much GPU time. Especially with just one light source and no bump mapping and what have yuo. CPU and RAM I'd think would be more important. But what do I know.

Yea if you have two monitors and a nice vid card you can do this nice. On just one monitor, you're kinda squeezing em both in there and its hard to compare any two windows. Dual screen you can have one MasterCAM running on one monitor, and another full screen on the other. Unfortunately we don't have that but itd be damn cool