[Oskimach]

I am trying to cut a keyhole with a flat and a transfer radius on both sides where the two hole tangent. The book I have says I can leave the (X,Y) starting points as question marks. Then i just need to give the centers of both circles as I and J values. I do not understand the up, down, left, right commands of the programming. I also entered in the radius to be smoothed in. I quess I need to know what I am doing wron and the up, down, right, left commands mean. Thanks.

[jimiscnc]

up/down/left/right are "helpers" when programming in mazatrol with unknown points ("?" instead of hard numbers for X, Y, Z)

When there are two possible points of intersection between a circle and line, or circle and circle, these helpers tell the control which of the 2 intersection points you want to use.

The only place I've ever seen such a system is in mazatrol.

Mazatrol was invented prior to the personal computer era. It was great back then for dealing with unknown cartesian coordinates. In this age of CAD freeware and a PC in every work station:

http://www.3ds.com/products/draftsight/

the benefits of "the mazak way" diminish.

To help visualize what Mazatrol wants, it is helpful to extend your lines in both directions to infinity, and your arcs to full circles. this would show how mazatrol "thinks" and also show the 2 possible points of intersection that mazatrol could choose.

other pieces of geometric info you can add are the angle of a line - you can start with hard X-Y coords, and unknown X-Y (or X or Y only) and state the angle of the line. Then it needs another line of figure after the "?" line with as much info as you can give it, and mazatrol can turn the "?" into hard numbers. The following line gives it something to intersect to.

the orientaition of angle is 0 degrees is the X plus axis, 90 degrees is the Y plus axis, etc.

lastly, angles can be described as the two legs of a right triangle, so if you know the X and Y of an angle, but not the actual angle, you can put that in the spaces in the figure in your unit to describe an angle.

jim