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6 more Mastercam Tips to help your workflow.

Here are the links to the two previous tips videos...

7 Mastercam Tips

8 Mastercam Tips

With a third video, it's officially a trilogy. Only 6 tips this time, but it's about quality not quantity, right?

First up we're looking at dragging and dropping files onto Mastercam to perform a File Open or a File Merge. File Open, simply drag the file from Windows File Explorer, and drop it onto the graphics area in Mastercam. The only difference to perform a File Merge, is to hold down the Control key while doing this.

Second, minimizing and maximizing the ribbon bar. You can use the arrow way off on the right side of the ribbon bar to minimize and maximize, but you can also just double click on a menu item to quickly perform either of these actions.

Vector selection is the often forgotten selection method. Here, you'll hold down the ALT key while drawing a line over the items you wish to select. This is very useful in selecting intricate items or oddly shaped features.

Next, level importing and exporting. We can import and export through onscreen menus, but we can also use a drag and drop method as was used in the File Open tip. Here, we would be dragging and dropping a CSV file onto the Levels Manager. A nice thing with these CSV files, you can also edit them in Excel for added functionality.

A very quick tip here, the spacebar. This can be used to launch the last function used. This works with toolpaths, geometry functions, translation operations, etc.

Last, Temporary Midpoints. These can be used to avoid having to create temporary geometry just to get a selectable mid point. Hover over an item until you see a green + appear, hover over a second item until another green + appears, then, automatically, a red + exactly between the two green +'s will appear. This red + can be selected, and once selected all temporary points will disappear.

Stay tuned as I've still got a good list to cover in future videos.

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