fbm mill

[Joesph Jackman]

can fbm mill be made to work efficiently so that it is a benefit to a good cam programmer? out of the box i do not like what i see so far.

[txcncman]

I have not tried to toy with MasterCam FBM. I tried EdgeCam FBM and was totally disenchanted. It seemed the system took longer to pick tools and tool paths than I could do myself.

[Larry Dickman]

can fbm mill be made to work efficiently so that it is a benefit to a good cam programmer? out of the box i do not like what i see so far.

I tried it once. It took some fiddling around, but once I figured it out, I couldn't believe how awesome it worked.

Only problem, the posted code was so F#!@ing huge it was unusable.

[Joesph Jackman]

so far i can get fbm drill to work pretty well. i think fbm drill might save me some time and be worth the effort.

having no luck with fbm mill. when i attempt to recognize the features fbm mill gradually starts up many excel.exe processes that i can see running in windows task manager. fbm mill then proceeds to put up what seems like a never ending bunch of of message boxes asking if it want to save or ignore the fbm mill tool .xls and then finally fbm mill locks up and crashes mastercam X5. suggestions on what i might be doing wrong?

[Rstewart]

If you want to sit down for a week and enter in all the needed parameters and your tools, it *can* be semi efficient. You have to basically build a library of tools and their parameters.

This has been covered several times on a different forum with this same consensus...

[Larry Dickman]

so far i can get fbm drill to work pretty well. i think fbm drill might save me some time and be worth the effort.

having no luck with fbm mill. when i attempt to recognize the features fbm mill gradually starts up many excel.exe processes that i can see running in windows task manager. fbm mill then proceeds to put up what seems like a never ending bunch of of message boxes asking if it want to save or ignore the fbm mill tool .xls and then finally fbm mill locks up and crashes mastercam X5. suggestions on what i might be doing wrong?

I've never had it lock up on me. I would suggest starting simple, like just create a rectagular block with a boss on it, then try defining different cutters and get a feel for how it works. As is par for the course with MC, any help files are beyond useless.

One thing I recall, if I made changes, it would go to hell on me. The only way I could make a change was to delete the toolpath and start over. This was with X5.

As I was getting to before, unless you can DNC it, it's a complete waste of time.