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6D Contouring is part of 2D, 3D and 6D Contouring with Robot. Sign in with your ENCY account to access lessons, assignments and progress tracking.

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Hi there, so we're now going to work on the 6D contouring path. It works on much the same principle as the 5D by meshes tooling path that you've seen me use in previous videos. So we're going to get stuck in now. So we're going to go to machining and we're going to define a new operation.

So we're going to go to 3D, 5D advanced, and then 6D contouring here. And we would like to define our job as under job assignment, the curve that we're using. So we're going to click on a 5D curve and you can see now how it's automatically generated this rather fetching green ribbon. Now the green ribbon is actually very visually informative because what this does is this indicates the orientation of the center line of the cutting tool relative to the curve that it's actually cutting.

So in this instance, we can see that it's functionally demonstrating a normal orientation against the surface that the curve is applied to. This is pretty much perfect for our needs. So to cut this as cleanly as possible, the setup is going to be a little bit more complicated than the previous iterations because we're going to use axis E2 of the turntable as well. So under setup, I'm going to click on move up E3 and rotate E2.

I'm also going to set the tool orientation to, I'm going to leave that as it is. I want to set the rotary table vector, however, to minus X, which means that it's going to be coming in from this side here. And we are going to try generating a toolpath for the current operation now and seeing what it produces. Okay, so the first thing that I'm noticing here is that we've got some rather messy transitions on links and leads.

So because this is a more involved and complicated toolpath, I would like to set this to avoid collisions just to save ourselves any hassle going forward. And we're going to regenerate that toolpath now. And now what we're going to do is we're going to go to the axis map and see what's going on with the toolpath as it stands. So I'm going to click on build map now and automatically we've got a nice clear path here, no out of limits issues.

Going to turn on collision detection though, just to be safe. And that's looking pretty good so far. So we're going to build that graph. We're going to update the toolpath and we are going to pan across.

And we can see now that by using the rotary turntable to alleviate most of the work of what's going on, the tool is automatically elected to come in at the normal point that is closest to 90 degrees and then adjusted accordingly. So we're quite happy with that toolpath. We'll click on update toolpath again just to be sure. Close that window.

And now we are going to simulate this. So we're going to reset this node status and we are going to click on run. And so far, everything's looking really good apart from that slightly awkward transition from the previous toolpath. That's as a function of not turning on avoid collisions on all the previous toolpaths.

So that's nothing to seriously worry about. Again, because those other toolpaths were so simple, it was kind of a non-issue really. But since this one is nominally significantly more complicated, although we have removed 90% of the actual workload by using the turntable, which is a feature you do need to consider when you're setting up and laying out these workpieces for their final machining. Obviously, use of a turntable is not a necessity in every type of tool operation, but it's worth determining if it's going to save you work in the long run or not.

And of course, the beauty of ENCY's simulation methodology is that because it calculates all of the kinematics of the machine relative to itself and all of its ancillary parts, you can determine very, very quickly whether or not your life will be made simpler by mounting the final workpiece to the turntable or by mounting it to a static table. In this instance, using the turntable for this final contouring path has made our lives a lot easier, so I'm going to call that a win. Yeah, so that wraps up our basics of contouring videos. We will be going into more detail on how to apply use of rotary turntables in other contouring situations as well in the future, but as a very, very quick overview in Primer, hopefully this should make things simpler for you.