How to Program a Threadmill 

Salvadore, if employees can’t simply type up g-code even if it’s thread milling without paying attention for a typo then the are not machinists they are button monkeys, a Walmart greater can draw up shit on mastercam. NWTC is training skilled machinists not mindless machine operators. At my shop I don’t hire anyone that cannot write g-code on control. Might I suggest that you enter NWTC’s machining program to further the skills that you do not possess.

@@austinthome317 congratulations on overpaying for machine operators. are you going to tell me that your fresh out of school machinist that can write code by hand is going to be trusted to do much more than change parts? the guys with the volume of knowledge required to run one off parts or fixes to tooling have gained enough gcode experience to make the changes they need to or write it out from scratch. and speaking of hiring, can you even find operators, let alone skilled machinists in the industry these days? if you care that much they can hand write a helical toolpath by hand i'd be surprised if you didnt make them do their math with trig tables and a slide rule. i do not need to further my skillset, im well compensated and have a great position. i prefer to do things in cam because i know there are few people that can model as fast as i can, as well as having my own posts sorted for the machines i run. i've made it a priority when a post doesnt do what i want that i fix the post, and not just a hard code fix, an actual dynamic fix.

@@salvadorebertolone you do have a point when I comes with using mastercam and posts for certain machines, but that works for bigger machine shops with fancy machines what about the smaller shops that don’t have such luxuries. If you’re so skilled start your own shop and become an entrepreneur instead of working to acquire somebody else’s dream. And if you write the G-code for a helical milling cycle it’s about 10 lines of code or less and it’s a template for future use, compared to doing it on mastercam which will give you a hundred lines of code which wouldn’t be the best for older and smaller machines

@@austinthome317 its coming. the bread winner is that i have some novel tooling designed to expedite a remanufacturing process, patent will be happening closer to starting to keep it a trade secret until im open. i have some customers for this process, i have capital, just not enough to operate while starting, just getting all the ducks sorted and lined up before i order a machine... a 5 axis twin pallet horizontal, so theres a lead time on that as well. im not sure what your mastercam post is doing, but the fusion haas post does a 1" deep 1/2-13 in about 30 lines. perfect example from today, there is 1 other guy capable of programming, and setting up machines in my shop, probably close to a decade in cnc based tool and die work, wont lie, hes definitely stronger with gcode than me, but i can run circles around him in the cam. we wound up doing nearly identical jobs today, super simple, had to face off a large bearing mounting flange on a weldment. his was a 12" circular pad, mine was a 16". he had about an hour headstart on me, both machines required tearing down prior setups. i nearly caught up to him, about 5 min behind after my final pass, but my weldment had about 1/8 parallelism error in it i had to shim out which slowed me down. he had jammed his cycle, i did mine in cam. it literally took less than 5 min from start to finish. a big speed advantage i have with cam, is i often have reasonably powerful laptop next to the control and can serial the data straight from my computer to the control, no mucking about trying to hop skip jump a program to the control with usb sticks. this discorse has been useful, though, i may starting building a table based gcode generator for certain tasks, but again, this is way beyond what nearly all machine shops are looking for for future employees, bottom line is i can do what most shop leads want. they toss me a drawing and say make it. they dont care how i get from a to b. just as long as i get there, and i can get there faster than others, often with extraordinary tool life to boot because i adaptive/dynamic nearly everything. disclaimer i've exclusively been a mill guy on cncs, turning is a whole different world in this conversation.