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Hello there, now that we've finished the surfacing on this particular workpiece, we're going to finalize the last parts that need covering. If we look at the simulation result, we can see there are a few un-machined sections here, so we're going to tidy those up now. The first thing we're going to do is define a new group, and we'll call this finishing. The first operation I'm going to use is a scalloping operation, so let's add that now, it's under 5D.

We're going to need to tilt the tool we have slightly, so tilting it by 30 degrees looks like a good position to go with. Now we need to define our job assignment, and the good thing about this is it's actually going to be fairly self-determining at this point. I've already drawn up these squares for the different sections we need to machine, so I'm going to use this one as our job zone and define the surfaces we want to machine. Let's quickly grab these.

Let's grab this one, and then 1, 2, and 3, and those are our machining surfaces. Now we want to limit the total depth of operation, so we go to strategy and set the bottom level to minus 24. I like round, easy-to-remember numbers, and this green zone obviously extends all the way up to the links and leads level as well, the safe motions, so let's change that. At the moment, 10mm from the part is actually quite high.

We're going to move this down; this should be about fine, so let's go with minus 160, giving ourselves a little bit of leeway. With that, we're now going to try generating a toolpath and see what sort of result we get, and in truth, that's actually pretty clean; it's in line with what we need. I'm going to simulate this and see what the result looks like. Let's slow down a little bit, press run now, and there are no particularly unexpected things happening there; that's all good.

If we click on verify compare, we can see we've still got a little bit of access around here, but nothing serious. Again, this isn't a production part; it doesn't need to be absolutely perfect. This is more about demonstrating technique, but I'm also going to show how to tidy up these edges here as well. To do that, we're going to set up another scalloping operation in much the same way we just did, albeit at a slightly different angle.

I think I'm going to come from the other side, so let's set that to a slightly steeper angle as well. Let's set it to minus 40, and yeah, let's just do this one first. Again, minus 40 is absolutely fine. With the job assignment, we're going to set the job zone and the machining surfaces, so let's grab these.

That should be fine, and do the same again regarding the depth as well. Let's get in line with that. The bottom level is doing its own thing at the moment, so let's rationalize that a little bit. 135 is an easy number to remember, and for the links and leads level, the safe level is 10mm from the part, which is a little extreme.

Let's bring that down to about there, so let's go with minus 100; again, an easy number. That should do us for that, so let's generate the toolpath and see what happens. Okay, that tooltip does get a little close, but nothing too drastic to worry about. I think the simulation is in order at this point, so let's slow it down, make sure that transition is okay; yep, that looks fine, no obvious collision there.

That cleans up that edge nicely; yeah, that looks good. We can probably do much the same but flipped over this axis here to tidy up this corner. I'm thinking we can duplicate that operation, so I just right-click, duplicate. We're going to change the C axis position to positive 40, and we're also going to change the machining surfaces and the job zone geometry.

This is going to be our job zone now, and our machining surfaces are going to be these. We should be able to generate a functional toolpath straight off the bat; yep, now that clears that nicely. Again, with the simulation just to be certain, that looks good; yeah, I'm happy with that. Lastly, we want to take a look at this channel here because, as we can see, there is still a bit of un-machined material there, and it would be useful to get into that.

There are a couple of options; I'm going to look at a morph toolpath for now, which should get us pretty close. We can play around with things like tolerances for actual real-world parts, but for now, I want to show you the easy way to run multiple passes when you don't have a contour that's quite right but do have a surface with two bounding contours. We're going to go to 3D 5D advanced, we're going to go to morph, and we are going to set our machining surfaces, if I press Ctrl instead of Shift, that would be useful. If I press ctrl instead of shift, that would be useful.

We're going to define our drive curves, which are these two here. After that, we're going to change the orientation of the tool slightly because we don't want it to be canted in C, so we're going to set that to 0, and we want to come from the other side in A. 20 degrees looks good for that, I think; in which case, we can now generate that toolpath, and we can see that it goes back and forth a couple of times. It's worth noting that the radius on this might actually be a 6mm radius, so that is going to be tight for a 6mm tool, especially doing multiple passes like that.

We may see a tiny bit of red come up in the verify compare, just so no one is surprised. For now, I'm going to make sure that the safe level is good; oh no, the safe level is good and ridiculous there, so let's bring that down to minus 140. That should be okay, so let's generate that toolpath and see what it says. No obvious intersections there; that's a good start, and we'll very quickly simulate; yep, it does, there you go, only the tiniest amount of red there.

That's a factor of it being a very tight space directly fitted to the exact tool size, which isn't really optimum if you're not doing something like slot drilling. Realistically, going over that with something like a 3 or 4mm ball nose would have been better, but either way, the methodology is shown, and that's the important bit. We'd like to mirror this over on this side as well, so we need to add a multiply group. One multiply group goes there, and we're going to move these operations into said multiply group, which means we'll have to recalculate them.

That's a bit of a pain, but it is the way. Now we define the multiply group schema, which is going to be axis symmetry, based on the global coordinate system. It's going to be along an axis of 90 degrees, which I think should give us what we need. Except 90 degrees is the wrong number, so zero, and that's the correct number.

Even when you're confident with these things, it's still very possible to get small details wrong. That's part of the reason why I haven't been going into really fiddling around with operations on deep levels for this; I want to keep it fairly clean and simple if possible. I've noticed there's an issue with a transition between the two groups, so we're going to need to alter the links and leads on this. That will likely have an effect on everything else as well.

So that's the approach between copies; that's what we're doing. Unfortunately, it does require all of this to be recalculated, but strangely enough, only the latter half. Let's regenerate those toolpaths and see what it produces. We give that a second to think about it.

Once that's finished linking, we can then do the finishing section again. Now we can see we don't have any obvious collisions, which is good. That's exactly what we're after. We're now going to simulate the transition between the two groups.

Let's go to the last multiply group. Let's quickly fold all this down because we don't really need the distraction. Let's take a quick look at this. We're going to speed this up a little bit.

That's the first instance we've already checked out and looked at. That's corner, corner, and morph, and the transition over looks good. So that scalloping has come up well. It's corner, corner, and morph.

If we take a quick look at the verify compare, we can see that's generally fairly clean. You can get in with much finer details to get better results going forward.