Hi,
I know this is bit of a long shot but i found a thread on cnczone using google of a user 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 he might able to help me (now PM’d) and to create a thread,

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 along with screenshots and look to share this on cnczone for anyone else in the future,

Alternatively I was thinking we could change software to a more modern package but it doesn’t seem like there is much of an offering on Wood Lathes, particularly lathes with a Swivel Cutter function?

My final plan of action was to simply convert DXF drawings to gcode, and manually add the gcode for the swivels at the correct points (I have this code ready),

Many thanks,

Daniel