[morrowcamaro]

Hopeing someone can help me out. I am trying to run a 5 axis program on our VF8, and am running into some issues. Just for reference there is no one in our shop that has programmed, set up, or ran 5-axis parts in our shop. So all this is new territory for me. I've attached a pic of my cam and machine set up for reference. In the machine pics you can see that the tool is not in the correct position, it should be coming down through the vector created by the center point of the previously cut hole . The previous pocket operation came out in the right position and depth, but when A indexes something is off. I indicated the A and B axis to find the center of rotation, then offset my part in MasterCAM the distance from the center of rotation to the top of the chuck jaws.
Attachment 275726 Attachment 275728

[Donkey Hotey]

I'm also no expert on 5-axis but, I did stay at a Holiday Inn last night.

Are you confident that the Mastercam machine definitions and post processor are correct for your setup? Has ANYTHING 5-axis been produced by that seat of Mastercam? I would imagine that you'd have to add both axes to the table definition so the output numbers would make sense.

As a check, I'd probably do some drill holes right at the 5-axis origin, along different directions. Then I'd post that and read the G-code to see if the XY numbers remained zero, with just the A&B axes changing. If not, it's pretty obvious that Mastercam doesn't know where the axes are or what they're doing.

[morrowcamaro]

Thanks for the reply. I believe I have the previous issue sorted. I checked my distance from the center of rotation of axis A to the my part origin and that value was off a bit in the program, so when A indexed to run the path it wasn't located correctly. Now I'm trying to figure out why the 5 axis swarf tool path insists on posting out a feed rate of F999.9 to the NC file.