Well been a busy time the last week so not got as far as I would have liked but have made some progress.

I talked to Sean at BobCAD regarding the issues I had with the tool holders and never really got any resolutions.
It does seem that you can assign the tool holders with the dotted circles  but not as per the instructions in help or at least that is my impression.

Regarding the facing operations it seems BobCAD will rotate and mirror the tool holder and it seems that will not change. Why they do it I have no idea and when I asked I never got an answer that seemed to be clear. The answer I got was

It is rotated in accordance to how the tool is rotated for the operation in the background.

Which means nothing to me other than it seems to be saying, thats the way we do it and its staying that way   but may mean something to others, so if it does please expand for me
 Now I can see no reason for rotating the tool holder at all, I have seen lathes that hold external tools along the Z although it is much more common to hold along X, but in either case if using the same tool for a facing and turning operation I see no reason for the CAM software to rotate and mirror as that is in my mind defeating the purpose of any collision checking as I do not know of any lathe that will automatically rotate and mirror the physical tool holder

BobCADlatheToolHolderSim - YouTube

Anyway its not a huge deal, just an annoyance, as the collision detection is of more benefit in internal working rather than external and that should, and seems to work well

However I have just found a way I can get round this idiosyncratic way BobCAD is doing things, seems it is possible to have two tool set up to the same tool number and offset and as long as you call them different names they are easily distinguished when selecting tools (see attached pic) So far it seems to work fine as can be seen in the following video, I have also left the original facing operation (second operation) where I selected the same tool as finish turning so you will see what I was meaning regarding the rotating and mirroring of the holder.
I have also  deliberately put a large X lead on the boring op so you can see the tool collide with the hole to see how collision detection can really help with internal operations.



I really am liking BobCAD Lathe and although it has some weird ways of doing things it does seem to be overall very good and produces good toolpaths once you figure a few things out.

Hood

Well I have been extremely busy the last few weeks so have not managed to get onto the Mill side of BobCAD up until tonight.
Just tried it and all I can say is what a difference compared to Lathe. Dont get me wrong, Lathe  is working well now that I have got the PP right and learned about the idiosyncrasies it has and have some workarounds for other things but it still has some things that are a PITA. That is not to say it is not good, it is, it is  better than a lot of Lathe CAM I have tried, even some that cost 2 or 3 or more times as much.
 Mill however seems to be on a different planet, I have only done a simple pocket operation but the steps to do it are nice and logical and in a walk through kind of format that can be skipped over or ended at any point.
Another thing that seems a huge improvement over Lathe is the speed of the toolpath generation, I was dreading the time it would take to generate a toolpath after seeing the speed Lathe does it, but it was instant in Mill. Granted it was just a simple rough and finish of a pocket with two tools but a comparable rough and finish on the OD in Lathe takes about 30 seconds to generate, Mill is instant, dont even see it doing it, toolpath just appears
 I am sure when I try more complex things the path generation time will get longer but it seems to be good so far

Hood

Hood,
Just wondering, have you ever tried CamBam?  I am using CamBan for milling right now, but I a very impressed with how it works for a very inexpensive program.

Gary H. Lucas

I tried it a while back for Lathe but wasnt very impressed with it. I think Lathe was still in its infancy at that time so may have improved since then.
Hood

Well I got some time this evening to mess a bit more with Mill, still just simple stuff but I wanted to try out parts I have done in other CAM packages just to compare.
 All I can say is I am very impressed so far and I am really liking it. Seems very intuitive and easy to learn.
 Just hope that Lathe gets a similar upgrade as the difference between Mill and Lathe is night and day, not just in the work flow but the speed of toolpath generation, in Mill its done, in Lathe you have to go away and come back later or you can get quite annoyed sitting watching it, especially when you have custom tool holders defined. Even the simulation in Mill opens 10 times faster than the sim in lathe but that may just be because my lathe parts were a bit more complex than any Mill ones I have done so far, time will tell.


Regarding Lathe, the CAM works out thread height/depth for the theoretical point, ie if you were using a sharp point tool. I use full profile tools mainly so that meant I would always have to edit the code produced to reduce the depth, only way around that from the CAM side would have been to manually enter the height each thread and for that you would have to work it out depending on the pitch and diameter of the thread.
The Post Processor however is very configurable so I was able to alter it so that it ignores the CAM calculated height and works out its own values and it seems to be working well
 I have also done a few extra things in the PP, they are all to do with advanced options showing in CAM, things such as possibility to choose whether to have an optional stop entered at the end of a rough or a finish or thread or whatever. The advanced postion options mean as long as you can do some simple VB you can basically add anything you like to the advanced posting options page in the CAM so you can choose what you want as you go through the process of making the toolpaths
 Hood

Well here are the first jobs done with BobCAD Lathe, the thread height alterations I did t the PP worked great for the external threads on the 25 mm Dia stainless, first attempt was spot on so the optional stop wasnt needed, but its always good to check

Also have BobCAD altered so I can add a M5 and M1 after any op from BobCAD itself, that way I dont have to edit code manually. Helped clearing the mess away after the roughing op of these 125mm dia nylon rollers.

BobCAD Lathe is working great now I have altered things a bit and that is only possible because the PP is very configurable 


Hood

Hood,
I used to turn rollers like those all the time. I mounted them on an arbor in a collet on my mill spindle and mounted the cutter on the table. One thing that worked really well. I had a shop vac with a large tank and the suction through the lid not the side.  I'd put a garbage bag in the tank. Once you started the plastic chip into the vacuum hose off to one side it would continue the whole time you were cutting.  No mess and the chips were already in the bag for disposal.  One word of warning, do NOT reach in the chip bag, the static charge REALLY hurts!

I have done similar on the manual lathe when doing delrin/acetal but never had much luck turning  nylon dry so vac is out for that
Used to really hate nylon when I had the manual chuck on the CNC, had to grip almost full depth of the jaws or it would get pulled out of the chuck with the stringers. Now I have the hydraulic chuck its no problem  as even if it starts to work loose the chuck just grips tighter. Even better I used to only get 8 rollers per metre of nylon, now I get 10
Hood

I have not had as much time as I had hoped to get aquainted with BobCAD. I am fairly well versed now with the Lathe side of things but I have only really just managed to look seriously at Mill in the last couple of days.
 At first it was a bit difficult but I soon got into the way of things, especially when I watched one of Als videos and saw how I could extract lines from the model and thus was able to use them for toolpaths etc.
One thing I love is the Open Pocket routine, it allows you to tell BobCAD that it can pass through a line when pocketing. That means you can mill a slot out easily without having to draw extra geometry on the model, all you need to do is tell BobCAD which lines it can pass through by changing them from Solid lines to dotted lines.
Below is a pic showing what I mean, you will see the toolpath in the first pic is as you would expect in a normal pocket.
In the second pic it shows the Open Pocket toolpath.
I have also put up a simulation on you tube and you will see that here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WSEwruX22o

I made the model of this part to mimic something I have done before, that allowed me to compare BobCAD to other CAM packages and to say I am impressed is an understatement Once you get into the way of how to do things in BobCAD it seems very nice indeed. It is definitely not as intuitive as other CAMs I have used but seems to be every bit as powerful as others I have used.

Hood