Mastercam , Issues - Self-teaching need some guidance.

I am an apprentice machinist+Turner. Our shop currently only uses long-handed programming and as i see myself wanting to learn cam i have been self-teaching myself using learners addition.

I have been running into these issues on a number of moch parts.

So far i have been working my way through the university tutorials , MLC cad tutorials , and glanced over titans of cnc lessons.

Has anyone any other recommendations for learning, Its challenging being faced with constant errors/crashes,collisons and not having a the sense on how to trouble shoot the issues.

Currently experiencing
- Excessive Feed toolpath times, -
-Finish tool path cuts into the material/Body of component
-Chain selection on Internal Bore. , It either follows the undercut or includes the full shoulder when selected,

The University tutorials are extremely basic, and they hold your hand for everything. So even a 90 year old grandma can do them.

My advise, pay attention to how and why they are doing things, chain directions, settings, etc.
Feeds and speeds you will have to learn on your own since those aren't typically set for a real world scenario in those tutorials.
The .pdf's that you have access to are good reference material for when you get stuck. I've referenced back to the 5 axis pdf's a couple of times when I was learning and they helped me out.

The devil in maserCAM is there's always some hard to find checkbox that will change your life. When boring complex internal profiles with multiple steps, for example, there's a "use stock recognition" option that will start by taking into account the actual stock you have for that cycle. I've solved other problems like you've described by getting my lead ins and outs set correct. See this video for a great run through stock recognition. I'm trying to remember since it's been a few months, but I recall feeds and speeds come from the tool I believe, so you want to define a tool library for yourself where the tools are set with around the right default values. It's important in the long run that your posts truly output the proper code for your machine. The default lathe post is for an upper right turret, which is fine, but we have a Haas TL-1 with a traditional lower right tool post, so I had to buy a post so as to get one that truly reflects reality. You could sort of fake it with the default post except I couldn't get the turret it to go to a specified position at the end of the cycle, instead it always wanted to go to machine 0 in Z, i.e. the far right end of the bed. So you'd have to hand edit code every time, whereas the proper post allows you to set where you want those coordinates to come from. Once I got all my tools and the post set up right, I found CAM to be be really efficient vs conversational anything moderately complicated. It's also nice to be able to simulate through the whole part as you can optimize everything better.

localbiker said:

-Finish tool path cuts into the material/Body of component

Click to expand...

Looks alright to me? If it's the blue line that looks like it's inside the part you're talking about. It's that way because of tool radius compensation.

localbiker said:

-Chain selection on Internal Bore. , It either follows the undercut or includes the full shoulder when selected

Click to expand...

You need to look for a button called Plunge Parameters. It's in both Lathe Finish and Lathe Rough. There you can set so the tool with not make plunge moves. It will then skip undercuts like that even if you got it selected

Yes there is several ways of doing almost every task in mastercam. That's one of the things I like about it. You solve a task like you want to.

About collisions in Mastercam. The obvious one is are you maching on the right side of the line.
A lot of times it's lead in/out related if internal. Grooving, you can check stock to leave in rough otherwise lead in/out.

Mastercam is pretty unforgiving in actually telling you what you did wrong.