Do you use Tool Kits - Kit Assistant

[MIKE JEFFERS]

iman carrot
why dont you use dolphin to generate your code?

[ImanCarrot]

I do for my Turret Mill, but for my Diamond Turning lathe it's a bit more complicated, the equation I use too complicated for Dolphin to handle:

f(x)= [(x^2/R)/(1+SQR(1-(K+1)-(X^2/R^2)))]+ A4^4 + A6^6 +A8^8... etc

R= radius of curvature which can be anything (and convex or concave),
K= Conic coeffiecient, 0 for a sphere, -1 for parabola between -1 and 0 for a prolate spheroid (small end of an elipse) and >0 for oblate spheroid (large end)
X= Distance from centre (X0) incremented in 0.005mm.
A4-A10= Aspheric co- efficients which modify the sag

Put into this mix the fact that stoopid designers sometimes use the Conic Constant instead of Co-efficient and sometimes get the signs of the Radius and/or aspheric coefficients wrong and you can see my headache lol.

[MIKE JEFFERS]

oh ....right .....

[swarfmaker]

Hi Mike,
I've been using pathtrace for about 17 years give or take and so i've seen all changes most for the good i might add, at moment im staying on 7.75 as i like to stay behind a bit as before ive rushed in and up-revisioned and then found that alot of surfacing done in previous revision has been re-pathed with unexpected results. and once saved in new version theres no going back, by the way we do do alot of 3d work.
i've looked at latest editions and to be quite frank i think software guys need to have a working,well experienced,shopfloor person to look over what they are doing.
An example- old facemill command- put in a few parameters and 3 mouse clicks later done
New facemill command- put in lots of parameters, create boundaries, then mess about with until paths are what you want.
Same with old surface lace command -you knew what it was going to do but with new surface commands software guys seem to be trying to put it all on one tab with all commands on it.
Now i know that there still there as "superceeded" but for how long.
Looking at amount of work that we do on edgecam(we have got approx 2500 ppf files each with at least 4-6 programs.
I did the post compiler course some years ago and over years have refined posts so that the guys on shopfloor do not do any editing at all, even speeds,feeds also theres no single blocking(whos got time for that on 200,000 line programs).By the way thats not including our turning ppf's
Any way back to original question "Do i use tool kits"
Answer "no"
I can see that they would be useful if you had a lot of common parts but we tent to use about 8 pockets in all our machines with same useful tools and then when we call these tools from database they are defaulted to that pocket.
When i first saw pathtraces tool database i had a little chuckle put it to one side and started afresh, everytime a new tool is used it is created 1st so our tool data base has in excess of 8000 tools (probabley 40% of this is 1mm-20mm drills in .1mm inc. and same with reamers and all types of taps threadmills)

But inspite of my moans edgecam still up there at the top and believe me i've programmed on a more than a few other cam systems.
Regards

[enno_onne]

I never try that before