[DanielDK87]

Hi all,

I know this is bit of a long shot but i found a thread of jms@RL on cnczone (i have pm'd him so im hoping he is still a current user) using google saying that he has 9 years’ experience using a Hapfo 7000 wood lathe with MegaCad, so i decided to sign up to the forum hoping jms@rl or anyone reading this might be able to help me?

I have years of CNC experience myself using 5 axis Glass / Stone CNC Work Centres and also 5 axis waterjet cutting (CAD/CAM etc), but unfortunately this experience hasn't proven too useful for the situation i now find myself in,

basically, my girlfriend and her brother have a little wood turning company in England, and they have a Hapfo 7000 wood lathe which uses MegaCad (ver 4.8), unfortunately the only person who knew how to use the machine has left and won't give any information on its use, so i have been trying to help them out.

As there is next to no documentation available to me I’ve had to try and figure out what needs to take place in order to program the machine, which I think goes as follows

Draw the design as a .prt file

Generate a .cdl file, using colours assigned to sections of the drawing, colour 10 to swivel left, colour 12/13 to swivel right, with all other colours to swivel center

Using the .cdl file, generate a .npc file for the machine to run – at this point we then have to convert the .npc to .ngc (gcode) as they are using LinuxCNC to operate the lathe (because I believe something has gone wrong in the past with the original)

I can generate all of the files, but I find that the machine doesn’t follow the swivel actions needed, and I think its because im probably doing something wrong when generating the .cdl file,

Any help anyone could provide would be very much appreciated, and from this I would write up some form of instructions with screenshots and look to share this on cnczone for anyone else in the future,

Failing this, i was just thinking of converting DXF Files to G code, then manually entering the g code to make the swivels take place (i have this code already) at the correct points,

looking through google it doesn't appear there are a great number of software packages we could use aimed for wood turning, only metal, am i correct in saying this?

Many thanks,

Daniel

[DanielDK87]

very sorry, ive made a duplicate of another post by accident as I couldn't see this one once posted and figured I had done it wrong,

could someone delete this thread leaving the later one,