All about application and ROI. The gig I had where we used this...we cut annulus grooves at 10-12X dia's deep in hydraulic manifolds using devib boring bars. No way could these parts be chucked in a lathe efficiently. Saved countless hours on machine time & custom tooling that used to be used to interpolate the grooves. Sure the potential for machine wear is there. Tho by the time you count the hours and days and months saved...machine wear becomes a minimal cost (till the day comes where ballscrews have to be replaced & the job was due yesterday...yea that never happens)

The little I have played with Mach sim....it is possible to edit the machine travels so your A axis will only tilt positive. Now wether Mach sim translates that correctly or just errors out I don't know.

At some point there has to be some seriously diminished rewards (or even negative returns) for $$$ spent on a Xeon CPU. For example: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2679+v4+%40+2.50GHz&id=2805 20 cores is impressive, tho from what I've seen with 8 cores is mcam rarely (never) maxes out that number.

The one thing that p1sses me off about mill-turn is the "legacy" toolpaths are gone. No flowline, blend, ect. While not a deal breaker it does make the job more difficult.

This thread made me go digging. I have a set of 5 1/4 floppies with version 3.21. Any chance it is compatible with Windows 10? Finding a 5 1/4 drive is another problem. Then this place never throws anything out....There are a few old Packard Bell computers I could fire up. Or not.

V4 Wire screenshot:

Just going off of memory....V5 was the first to look like the V9 interface that we all have seen. Before that I don't really remember...might of not had the icon's across the top. V7 was the first to have any kind of associativity.....but only on 2d toolpaths.

Was was the ballpark price on the Gerardi?

Wow thanks! That finally got it.

Ugh. So after years of being told that Top-Front was the proper way, now Front-Top is?

I posted this on the offical Mastercam forum, and got crickets. Figured I would try here. In previous versions, with the right click menu in the operations manager, when you chose to expand or collapse operations it collapsed (or expanded) every thing in that group (Toolpath group, machine group, operations ext). In 2017, all it does is mimic the behavior when you click the plus or minus sign next to the group. Has anyone else noticed this?

I just tried it with the generic 5 axis machine def/post....The feedrates match exactly what you have in your toolpath parameters.

I'm in Utah, where there is no such thing as dirty living, and was hit with this like the plague. Might be time to change this states way of thinking????

I started playing with doing this also. While nowhere near as refined as what you have, I was able to get a few things to work. One of the things I did a little different was 'a$$ume' that when climb milling a G3 would always be an internal arc and G2 would be an external arc. This way on a contour around a part it would compensate for both external and internal. Say a shape like the one attached. I don't have anywhere near the expertise...I couldn't get it to work properly on a lead in arc...so grabbing that idea from you. Just some thoughts

I was a nightmare. All 6 of our milling seats had this issue. If you were working off established libraries, you were safe. If you had to create a tool, you would make damn sure you saved before you did it. Update 1 was supposed to address this issue, time will tell if update 2 actually does. 2017 should of never been released before this fix. I hate to be that kind of critic, and people say "it only happened sometimes to some people", but when it happened all the time across 6 seats and people ask the guy who installed it (me) why...you get the idea of my frustration. It's no exaggeration to say that hours and hours of productivity were lost. Ok vent over. I do like the new interface, to the point where I did suffer through the crashes for the past month or two.

Thank gawd. 2017 has been the most unproductive, unreliable hunk of sh!t since X3. Yes the tool manager bug was that bad.

What I have had to do in the past was make a point toolpath with at an orientation of something like A-1 deg and C180 deg. The post will position to the C180 position, and when it does to A0 the C "should" stay at 180deg.

That is my guess also. It was one of the few things I liked about NX. http://www.harveytool.com/secure/Content/Documents/Tech_RunningInCircles.pdf?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Harvey_Email_CircularInterpolation

are your molds out of ferrous material? Magnets are great for that kind of work. All 4 side of the part, no worries about clamps.

This is still my favorite aluminum facemill..... http://www.kennametal.com/en/products/20478624/57493250/556247/46610642/46708769/46847819/100001212.html

Nice link on the Kennametal stuff. i was hoping they had the variety of Iscar's offering...slotting tools, ect. Good stuff either way

Got a link to these Kennametal tools?

Tools like this are frustrating to me. With the millions and millions of these valves being made, one would think there would be an off the shelf solution for tooling. Finding that solution is tough....

I believe Pioneer has what you are looking for. Alternatively, they also have their "SX" collet system (which is identical to Nikken's SK collet) which is much more robust that ER collets.

I don't know what Update 1 was supposed to fix. The biggest bug, tool manager crashing Mastercam still bites me. I don't even get a chance to send an error report. Just boom, gone. The other annoying as sh!t bug, drills automatically renaming, still there. I don't have time for this. Once again, back to X9.