Solid Hole Enhancements

There have been many enhancements to Mastercam’s hole-making functions. Many of these will be helpful in your drilling and Process Hole operations.

Easily Smooth the Edges of Solid Holes

Mastercam 2024 now offers an easy way for you to break the hole edges in solid parts. Hole operations in this release now include options for edge treatment from within the function panel.

While in previous versions of Mastercam, you could only create a chamfer at the top edge of a hole, Mastercam 2024’s new Top Edge Treatment parameters allow you to create either chamfers or fillets on your hole edge. Mastercam has also expanded options to generate a chamfer by giving you the option to specify the size of the chamfer by entering either its diameter or its width distance.

Additionally, you can now smooth the bottom edges of through holes. Simply select the Match top and bottom option to apply your top edge treatment settings to your bottom edge, or enter specific values into the Bottom Edge Treatment section in the function panel.

Creating New Operations from a Single Hole Operation

Mastercam 2024 makes incorporating design changes to existing holes in your solid easier. New options in the Solids Manager and the Hole panel allow you to create, move, or copy hole operations from hole operation groups.

In the Solids Manager, the Explode hole operation option creates an operation from each instance in a group of holes. For example, to create eight, separate operations from a single operation with eight holes, select the Explode hole operation command from the Solids Manager’s right-click menu. Mastercam instantly creates and displays each operation in the Solids Manager.

To apply design changes to specific groups, open a Hole operation from the Solids Manager. Select the individual hole positions in the Hole panel and choose the Move to new operation or Copy to new operation commands from the right-click menu. Then, click Regen on the Solids Manager toolbar. The new, independent operations are reflected in the Solids Manager.

Changing the Direction of Existing Through Holes

In Mastercam 2024, we have added a new Reverse Hole button to the Hole function. This option allows you to flip the direction of selected through-holes. It moves the hole’s associative point (the point that was selected to create the hole) to the opposite end of the hole and reverses the vector (the direction of the hole).