Took a new job this summer, and have now got sole access to a Haas TM1, a Minimill, and a HL-1 lathe.

The lathe and TM-1 are both old controllers and the lathe is not under power.

I am in the process of cleaning up the MiniMill, as when I powered it up, the spindle warmup program hadn't been run in 494 days...and the coolant tank is really, really bad.

Anyway, I use Solidworks and HSMworks2016, and now need to get it to output good code to run the Minimill with. Since it's not my machine, and I do not have formal training on this machine or toolchain, I wanted to run it past you gentlemen first-as I need to learn more about HSMworks than I already know.

First off-Setting up the Haas and getting tools setup is not a problem. I do need to make sure the tools in the machine match the tools in HSMworks.

Second-Need to practice setting up tools in HSMworks.

Third-Sometimes HSMworks does silly things that I want to change. For example, when using a 2d pocket operation, the program cuts air above the pocket first, then goes back and starts the actual pocket operation. It's as if it's trying to pocket through the material that was faced off prior to the pocket operation being called.

Anyone have any tips for 2 and 3?