Three questions from a Mastercam Newbie

[canyon289]

Hi,
I'm very new to mastercam and I have a few questions. Please bear with me as many of them are pretty basic but since I'm having trouble finding the answer in the help file I decided to ask here.

The part I'm trying to "machine" is simple curved contour. A sideview consists of a small radius with a flat face near the bottom.

When trying to machine this part in Mastercam I found myself with a few questions.

When machining the contour how do I specify how many passes to make? Mastercam picked two by default but supposing I want detail how can I tell it to increase the passes and reduces the steps to create a smoother surface?

I have two items in my toolpath manager, the surface contour and the final pass that cuts out the part. The start of the second move defaults to the origin and I can manually select it to be kinda close but I was wondering if there was somewhere to just have it start the next operation immediately without the an unnecessary to move to another coordinate How can I specify for the second operation to start where the first one ended?

Lastly the last operation has 6 chains and it retracts and plunges a number of times. This is likely due to the broken geometry, meaning I need to select 7 curves to get the whole way around but how can I make Mastercam recognize this as one continuous cut and stop it from bringing the tool up and down multiple times.

I've attached a number of screenshots to illustrate my questions. Thank you in advance for any answers

[beekeeper]

in your contour tool path go to cut parameters this is where you can set your paths up in depth and multi pass. to run a continuos pass across several lines splines and etc use your chaining option when you select tool path contour you have the several options for picking the geometry you want included in the tool path. However each piece of geometry must meet each other at the same point or it will give you a broken path full of the tool going up and repositioning for the next entity

[canyon289]

For surface rough there doesn't seem to be a cut parameters option, a different sort of dialog box opens up and there is an option for cut depth but for some reason it doesn't seem to change the number of passes.

Edit - Just figured out the first question, the total tolerance button brings up another dialog box that has a bunch more options to control surface smoothness. Mastercam sure has lot of these hidden menus that have what you want! Thanks for the reply nonetheless

[beekeeper]

Originally Posted by canyon289 For surface rough there doesn't seem to be a cut parameters option, a different sort of dialog box opens up and there is an option for cut depth but for some reason it doesn't seem to change the number of passes. Edit - Just figured out the first question, the total tolerance button brings up another dialog box that has a bunch more options to control surface smoothness. Mastercam sure has lot of these hidden menus that have what you want! Thanks for the reply nonetheless

go to surface rough contours open rough contour parameters towards the bottom it has a box cut depths you can adjust the depth once thats set using the maximum step down. If you are wanting to cut the contour I would not use the surface contour. surface contour is used to rough out a surface area

[canyon289]

What would be used to finish the surface?

[beekeeper]

depending on the contour and the way you want to machine it there are several options under surface finish to drive the cutter