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So, in this video, we're going to be actually looking at our first proper 4D operation. More specifically, we're going to be dealing with the outlining of these lobes here. And I appreciate that on a 4-axis milling project, having your first 4D operation is probably a bit of an exciting time since all we seem to have done so far has been 2D and 3D ops that have been indexed. However, it's worth saying that this is often the nature of how these things work.

Having 4 and 5 axes is quite often more useful for indexing purposes than it is for continuous machining anyway, especially with prismatic parts. However, in subsequent videos, we're also going to be looking at non-prismatic or more organic forms as well, which will be continuous for the machining. Anyway, so to get back to the point, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to define a new group and we'll go to Auxiliary and Group. And we're going to call this one Edge, okay.

And we are going to go to Add Operation and 4D Rotary, and we're going to grab a 4D Surfacing operation. So, I'm quite happy with the tool selection that we've got at the moment. We need to do something a little bit different in the job definition here, job assignment, sorry. So, first things first, I am going to select this face and then right-click on it and under the Select option, I'm going to grab Smooth, and that will grab every face adjacent to it that's in that same smooth transition.

And I'm going to click on Machining Surfaces here to define that as the face that we wish to machine. I'm also going to grab the surrounding curves. So, I'm going to double-click here to get the entire loop around that edge and set that as my first curve. And then I'm going to do the same again and set that as my second curve.

Now, we are, let's click on Generate now, see what it comes up with. So, if we click on Generate Toolpath now, you see we get this parallel to X toolpath, which let's be honest, probably isn't going to give us the best surface finish really, is it? So, what I'm going to do is I am going to go to Strategy, and I'm going to change this from Parallel to Vertical to morph between two curves. So, we'll regenerate that now.

And again, we've got, yeah, looks like a pretty nice path. There is, however, a slight difference that I want to make as well. I don't want the tool orientation to be to Rotary Axis. That is generally very, very good for stuff that is, has greater circularity than this part does.

I mean, as we can see that there's a certain amount of rectangular form to this, there's angles attached to it, which isn't really ideal for that. So, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that we've got a three-axis machine hanging off the back of this fourth axis, and I'm going to set this to Normal to Surface. Now, to those of you who've watched my robot videos and everything as well, you might think that's actually a much more 5D, 6D sort of setting to have. However, in this instance, oops, sorry, no, that's an okay error message.

You don't need to worry about that. It's just saying there's stuff going on in the background, that's all. But in this instance, the Normal to Surface basically means that when it encounters a It's not just going to stay in its fixed X, Y position, it's actually going to drag along here as well to give you a smooth linear machining face. So, we can now simulate this.

We'll just quickly simulate up to current operation, and we'll leave this running nice and slow. And with the 4D machining surface now, we've got, here we can see that the tool moves along and then continues to follow according to the rotation as well. Now, on these parts that are almost perfectly curved, you can see there's continuous interpolation there, whereas with flat sections, it treats it as an indexing. And it's a nice hybrid operation that does a really good job of giving a good and clean surface finish.

Anyway, I would like to increase the detail with which it's machining next. I want this to be a super smooth flange edge, so I'm going to stop the simulation at this point. I'm going to go back to machining, and I'm going to change the step from 20% down to 5% because it'll just be a much, much nicer surface finish when it's done. And we can see there, we've got much, much tighter step overs, and that will give us a really, really clean surface.

So if we go back to simulation now, and we're okay with this partially done one here, we can now speed this up a little bit, re-simulate, speed this up a little bit further. Now we've got this back and forth motion as well. We can potentially set it to a spiral form too, but again, that's entirely dependent on whether or not your fourth axis is limited to a plus or minus 180 range, or if it's capable of continuous rotation. I tend to find it safest to assume that they're not until proven otherwise.

After all, it's not something you really, really want to overload because they're generally quite expensive. But as we can see here, we have got a lovely clean surface, and that's come up beautifully. So in the next video, we will carry on with our part. I shall see you then.