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This video discusses the Delete Duplicates Function and FindOverlap CHook in Mastercam, which can be used to clean up geometry in your file.

If you are having problems creating a chain or find there is excessive entities in your Mastercam files, Delete Duplicates or FindOverlap can be used to clean things up. 

In this video we will show the use of Delete Duplicates when having problems creating a chain as well as review the use of FindOverlap and discuss the differences between the two.

There are many different ways that duplicate entities can occur in Mastercam. They can occur when using and of the Transform functions that result in a Copy or Join. When duplicating the geometry for the Transform if the result ends up on top of another instance, you'll have duplicate geometry. Think about a scenario where you have a circle and you want to rotate about a point to create a bolt pattern. If you want to end up with 4 holes evenly spaced, you would rotate the existing hole 90 degrees 3 times. A common mistake is rotating that hole 90 degrees 4 times. This would create duplicates at the first holes location. For the most part, not a big deal, but at least you can get an idea of how this happens.

Another common source of duplicate entities in Mastercam, importing DWG/DXF that are 2D representations of 3D objects. Often, shops are provided with DWG or DXF files that are the CAD print of the part to produce. These can contain all of the edges in that part in a flat drawing. Example, a cube. If you look at a cube directly from the top you will only see a 2D square, or 4 straight lines. But, in the CAD file, all the underlying edges are there as well. So not only the 4 lines of the face you see, but also the 4 lines of the face on the bottom of the part....and even the vertical lines of the front/back/left/right faces. 

In the above cube example, Delete Duplicates would only pick up the 4 duplicated edges of the bottom face and delete those. It would not see the vertical edges of the side faces as duplicates, since they are not the same size and shape. For these, you need to use the FindOverlap Chook. 

Unfortunately, Chooks cannot be run in the HLE, Home Learning Edition, of Mastercam. We have made a request for this function to be enabled in the HLE, fingers crossed it will be available in a future release. 

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