Need Help!- CATIA 4 Axis Part Setup

[rsmurphy2]

I've been stuck trying to post a 4 axis program for the last 6 hours and am getting absolutely nowhere. We have a 4th axis in our lab that no one has ever learned how to program and I'm working on a research project that requires this option. We tried entering a 4 axis interpolation through MDI and it worked fine so I know its set up correctly, getting the program from CATIA seems all but impossible. I may have to resort to coding this somewhat manually.

I've tried pretty much every surface machining option catia has and all the word tables available with no success even getting an A axis command to appear in the posted program. The most promising seems to be 4-Axis Curve Sweeping which produces the tool paths I'm looking for but something must be wrong with my machine configuration.

Can anyone comment on my machine editor setup as I believe something must be wrong here otherwise I should be seeing A's for my rotary axis about the X axis.

Thanks.

[BurrMan]

You have a haas post processor selected. Are there other options there? like Haas 4 axis or somethig? THere is also an "NC Data format". What options are in there?

[rsmurphy2]

The haas post is the only one specific to our machine, but I've also tried many fanuc posts to see if the A's would show up but I got nothing. I believe there's 3 other options in NC data type- ISO standards and 1 or 2 others I'll check tomorrow.

I'm real tempted to just pull the top contour along the X axis and splice in a bunch of A axis indexes with a macro to index the 4th over to the next channel and start the program over. Only take a couple hours instead of banging my head for another day.

PS. an advanced CATIA CAM tutorial book would be nice however I have found nothing. Mastercam has such great resources for learning this stuff but the CATIA knowledge base seems to be very inaccessible.

I was really hoping to learn how to do this the right way but I need to get this prototype done to stay on track for test dates.

[rsmurphy2]

Just to clarify, I selected the 3axis with rotary table option in the machine setup. The first pic shows that screen- regular 3 axis is the top button to the left, the buttons to the right deal with lathe NC. I have a strong feeling there is something wrong on that first page with my rotary table setup but have no way of checking other than trying every option and posting a new program each time...

[BurrMan]

Hey rsmurphy2,
Sorry not much help. I just noticed it appears the program has generated a nice toolpath there, so I would move towards the post processor needing attention.

I dont know Catia very well though so this may be off base.