Creating a Fixture Offset

[robmints]

Hi all. I'm in a much different situation than I'm used to at a new job. I do not have access to paid training and I come from a gibbs shop. I'm trying to teach myself MC v9 and it is going much slower than when I self taught myself gibbs. But my immediate need is creating fixture offsets so I can make parts in 4 vises. The only books I have are a free Mill/Design tutorial and a v7 Shuie/Lin, I cannot figure out the fixture offset/work coordinate to save me. Any help will be much appreciated.

[crazythunder]

Transform will allow you to use one operation and post it for 4 different vices. I would recommend looking over at emastercam and doing a search on transform and work offsets and you will find a ton of information on it over there. I would also suggest contacting your local dealer and see if they can get you a quote on up grading to the newest version. There have been many different changes to the software since V9.

[tobyaxis]

Originally Posted by robmints Hi all. I'm in a much different situation than I'm used to at a new job. I do not have access to paid training and I come from a gibbs shop. I'm trying to teach myself MC v9 and it is going much slower than when I self taught myself gibbs. But my immediate need is creating fixture offsets so I can make parts in 4 vises. The only books I have are a free Mill/Design tutorial and a v7 Shuie/Lin, I cannot figure out the fixture offset/work coordinate to save me. Any help will be much appreciated.

Some helpful information about what machine and control your programming for would help a bit.

[-Chris-]

Hi, its pretty simple really. As You start a routine of any kind Drill, conture pocket and such you pick your points chains or what ever then in the operation window where you pick your tool, then put a check mark in the T/C Plane box then click on that tab, a new window will open look to the bottom left there is a box for a check mark. if left alone throught your programing session all ops wil default to G54 if you want multiple fixture offsets check the little box then just to the right where you see a -1 change that to a 0=g54 1=g55 2=g56 and so on plan your ops for each vice and make sure you put in the right numbers and when you post all should be in its proper place. I hope this makes some sort of since. -Chris-

[robmints]

Chris,
"I see, said the blind man." Thanks a million. Now all I need to do is figure out how to get it to post "Okuma" with G15 H1,2,3 rather than G54,55,56. All I have is 1 post that came with MC, 1 post a previous co-worker wrote (that does not work), and MPmaster I got off the internet. It looks like I have 2 fanuc posts and one dead post.

tobyaxis,
Right now all I'm concerned about is the mills. We have 1 Okuma MX-45 with osp7000, and 1 Okuma Cadet style 4020 with osp 5020. We use the same programs for both machines. The lathe is a Cadet with about a 6 inch chuck and live tooling. But for now that is not what I'm working on. The lathe has work but is not hammered like the mills. All we use MC for is to generate snippets of tool path that are cut and pasted in to some templates that are modified on an editor. We cannot render the outcome so proving parts is time consuming and tedious. Many time small things have been overlooked like a height offset number or cutter comp number not being changed manually, or a minus sign being missed, and it will ruin your day. I'm used to depending on the model gibbs rendered to see my mistakes on the screen before they get to the machine. I see that MC does the same thing with even more flexability but the people working there don't know how to do it and it's driving me nuts to have a $8,000 program there and use $600 of it.

crazythunder,
The shop I came from, I ran. At this shop I do not have access to training or vendors. The people I work for are chemists and scientists and what the shop makes is just the stuff that holds the items they really care about. Before they would even consider an upgrade I need to prove to them that the software works. Once I get it working (with your, and lots of other help) I will see if I can get them to get the maintainance contract current. As I posted before, I think the post is going to be troublesome. Learning the MC it's self might take some time, but is coming along. For the post I think a saint is going to need to fall from the sky and help me with that one.

Thanks very much guys.

[tobyaxis]

There is a ton of literature and videos you can but for MCV9, have or can you purchase any of them??????????

http://www.techedu.com/Mastercam.asp
http://www.tipsforcadcam.com/
http://www.emastercam.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi

These are highly recommended

[robmints]

I just bought mill 1 and 2 from Mike. Thanks tobyaxis. I think it is going to cover a lot of ground I haver already covered but I hope to pick up alot of stuff like Chris just had to point out to me too. I guess I'll start another post about post help over in the post section. I have been able to change some simple stuff but I can't get the G15 H1 ect. to work yet.

[cadcam]

Robmints, hopfully you will also learn about WCS and you will be able to set the offset by the datum so you don't have to set each time you start a new path.

[robmints]

If I knew what a datum was, i would be ahead of the game. Thought it was something you did with girls.

But I went through Mike's quick start cd one time, played with the post a little to get it to do some things the boss likes to see, and now I'm going to get a little seat time practicing what I remember. But just a little time, just enough to be familiar with what to pay closer attention to. I'm going to go slower this time and do some of the stuff and change some of the settings and files like cfg and tl9 to be how I want them to be for now. Gotta start somewhere. This is harder for me to learn than gibbs was, but I'm a slow learner.

[cadcam]

Ok well you do do that with girls, but have you looked at a blue print while on a date and noticed that the prints have locations that numbers come from. usually called from a datum like Datum A.

so I am referencing the Datum word in your file as the location of X0,Y0,Z0 being your part home location.

Hope this makes more sense to you now.

[cadcam]

Also this for V9 might help with the WCS side.
please download my file that contains files and posts and PDF with samples and it explanes WCS for V9.

www.mastercam-cadcam.com/wcs.zip

[timmydabull]

thank you that was very helpful