I regularly follow practicalmachinist.com forums.
Especially the cnc machining section of it.

I notice when CNC Speeds and Feeds questions come up people often suggest my HSMAdvisor Machinist calculator.
A referral by a satisfied customer is the best referral in my opinion. Thank you to everyone doing this great favor to me and my prospective users!

Other times users of HSMAdvisor question speeds and feeds it generates and instead of going to me, they ask on forums.
Which is always fine, because extremely often "wrong" results mean something wrong in users expectations or the data he feeds the calculator

In the process of discussion it usually turns out that the calculation results were correct, but because user decided to use a depth of cut or tool length, larger than he should have, HSMAdvisor compensates and gives a very conservative feed rate.

Just like in this forum post over here: Engraving with a 1/32 ball mill machinist wanted Read More 

Tool Inventory Control has been added to HSMAdvisor as a free feature for our customers.

Here is a quick video explaining how to use this new feature.

Should you have any questions or recommendations please let me know via email or support forums.

Tool Inventory Advisor is now included into all HSMAdvisor License types!

This feature is absolutely free for HSMAdvisor customers. No special login is required. It is already built in!

Please download the latest update to enjoy the latest update!
Some video tutorials will be published this weekend.

Also in the this update:

• Changed the look of Material and Tool drop-downs
• Added search to Tool list drop-down
• Uploaded new machines to the HSMAdvisor Cloud
• Improved function of Tool Library
  Fixed small bugs
  "Shared Database" flag is now set in the database file itself

TiAdvisor (Tool Inventory Advisor) is a new feature under development within HSMAdvisor.

Unlike most cases when developers design a standalone product and then go through a laborious work of integrating it into existing software products, i decided to go the other way.

TiAdvisor will be developed as an integral part of HSMAdvisor and then, once complete, will be moved into a separate standalone product. This will make for seamless integration between our software products.

What TiAdvisor does

• Keeps track of inventory levels.
• Automatically add tools that are low in stock to Purchase Request List
• Generate and print Purchase Request form
• Add tools to stock when they are received

More functions are being worked on.

Download TiAdvisor bundled with HSMAdvisor over here: http://zero-divide.net/index.php?page=forums&shell_id=170&article_id=4776

TiAdvisor Workflow

Read More 

Did you know there are three ways you can touch off your tools?

Because of how Machine Offsets add up, there are several ways CNC machinists can set their Tool and Work Offsets.

This is especially true for Tool Length Offsets.

Tool Offsets can be either Positive or Negative.
Depending on your Machine Shop equipment you should use one or the other.

Regardless of how you set your tool length offset, you apply it the same way.
Right after the tool change and after turning on your spindle and moving to your X Y position above the part.
The very first absolute Z movement should be the line where you apply the tool length offset.

Positive Tool Offsets (gage line tool length offsets)

In the case of Positive Tool Offsets, the offset represents the Length of the tool measured as a distance from the Gauge Line of the spindle (typically spindle nose) to the tip of the tool. The longer the tool, the larger your Tool Length offset will be.

Read More 

A couple of things got broken after the last update, so I have just released a fix to solve the issues.

Now everything works better than ever.

Thank you to everyone for reporting the issues. I will make sure to avoid these problems next time around.

Cheers!

This is update is the last one before a pretty big new additional feature being added to HSMAdvisor. So i cleaned up all the little glitches and made a lot of invisible to naked eye improvements.

Without going into detail i can tell you that those features normally cost users of other software products upwards of several hundred dollars, and they will not be without a cost to HSMAdvisor users too.

This feature will be optional and only those who need it will be able to purchase it as an add-on Later this feature will become a separate software product with HSMAdvisor add-on being just a small part of it.

Development of HSMAdvisor will continue as normal.

 What is new and improved in this update:

• Improved function of Tool Tables. Removed flickering. Faster Filtering and scrolling.
• App Icon changed
• Modified over 45 Degree Ramping Feedrates for milling.
• Fixed Cloud Machine Upload

Haloween sale is ON!

All HSMAdvisor Licenses over $90 are currently 15% off!

You can buy a 3 Year Floating License Subscription Or a Permanent License now for just $82

Life Time Subscription is only $165 And Permanent License with LifeTime updates is $186

 Cheers!

Before we run any G-Code program, we need to tell the machine where our part zero is.
A Part Zero is simply a bunch of numbers that offset the axis to give the machine a new coordinate point to work from.

Work Offsets is one of the most basic pieces of knowledge any machinist must-have.

Let us account for all the basic coordinate systems and definitions, available in a generic CNC machine

• Machine Home and (Absolute) Machine Coordinates
• Work Offset Coordinates
• Tool Length Offsets

Machine Home and Machine Coordinates: G53

Machine Coordinates (or Absolute Coordinates) is the absolute and constant representation of the machine axis position.
These coordinates never change between Machine Restarts and must remain such. In fact, there is often no way for an operator to adjust the Absolute Machine Axis Home position.

Machine Home is simply that magical place where all Machine Coordinates should become Zero.

To Home the Machine is to start a machine operation, that will move all Axis to their soft limit position where X, Y, and Z-axis reading will be set to zero.

Homing must be done every time you restart your machine. Without it machine does not know where is the position of its table or spindle.

When homed your machine coordinates will read X=0 Y=0 and Z=0 and it is going to look like this:

The point where Machine X and Y intersect is called Table Home Position and the one where the Machine Z-axis starts from is called Spindle Home.

Now, there is no agreement between machine tool manufacturers on where the machine home should be.

Read More 

Proper machining depth and width of cut are just as important as proper Speeds and Feeds. 

This is not only importanttant for professional machinists, who are machining on the edge of their tooling and setup capability, but also for hobbyists, who often face limits from the machine rigidity side of the equation.

HSMAdvisor Speed and Feed calculator has a unique tool used for figuring the best engagement values for each particular cut you are making.

It is called Performance Slider. And it adjusts expected load on the tool and machine depending on your preferred machining mode.

Check out this video I made that explains Performance Slider' functionality: