Hood,
Thanks a million! very informative and very helpful. I went ahead and used the M06 call in the post because I have machstdmill/lathe and will likely use it down the road so it is nice to have all the buttons in places that are familiar.. i have not dug into it yet, but i believe it uses a tool change macro which can be setup similar to the mill profile. for now i just used a safe retract function in the cam software that will automatically remove the tool and send it to a designated indexing position at a tool change call, currently setup for x2 z4, I will probably change the x to 2.5", i have a 4" lathe chuck and my mastertool is the longest tool in my box so it should always give me clearance for any changes i need to make, and without a tail stock, i doubt i will be turning anything over 4" long so should be good there as well.
I attached a copy of my post, I will be using a cored 2" piece of stock for these parts and I haven't yet added a cutoff tool to generate that toolpath yet, probably tomorrow. the only tool i had was a neutral 35* diamond insert to cut the back portion of the part which is why it is creating a V. You got me all hot and bothered about a round insert and tool holder but i haven't found any budget oriented offering for one yet, i could see that tool being VERY useful!
I really appreciate all your help, I am currently cross eyed from going through the post code, very intimidating for someone who has never programmed anything before.. just shear will was driving me on..hahaha
let me know what you think of the code, a few things that were killing me was that everytime i would put a G91.1 in the post it made things screwy.. so i ended up just setting the post to have all I,J moves output in incremental and with mach set for I, J moves to be incremental it seems to jive just fine. i have the feed setup to call for either fpr or fpm depending on what i click in camworks, being i am unfamiliar thus far with values set in fpr and have gotten some experience from manual jog turning and using the wizards for basic turning jobs, i will probably stick with them for a while until i feel good about everything else.
you da man!
Chris