Sign in to watch this lesson

Furthermore, in this final video, we will cover the last machining processes needed to finish this part, but first we need to define a spindle takeover. This requires us to define some setup stages first. The very first thing we will do is set the initial spindle takeover operation, which you can see as turn takeover under add operation and move part. Don't worry about its positioning for now; this is not how it will finally be.

Now we need to define a setup stage under structure. In doing so, the setup stage will inherit the initial properties of the setup from the root operation. It allows you to define subsequent setups after this first one, which is a direct copy of our initial setup. The second setup operation we will use will allow us to redefine aspects like the workpiece setup, the workpiece connector, and all the coordinates related to that.

We are now going to add a second setup stage, which is now here. This allows us to define where the workpiece will be in relation to the other machining operations. To start, we will change the workpiece connector to the counter spindle and move the workpiece relative to its original coordinate system. I want to move it to about here; let's set it to minus 156, so we have a good grip on that collar there, and we'll click OK here.

We want to set the chuck diameter to 40 because that's the diameter of this part. The J2 chuck diameter is now 40; press return, and you can see how that clamps down properly. This pretty much defines our primary setup at this point. The next thing we need to do is start making our second stage actual turning operations.

First, we will face off this part, then perform a grooving operation, and finally do an outer diameter operation. It's mainly a roughing operation with a finishing pass. So first, let's define our facing operation. We go to lathe and lathe facing.

I don't know if you noticed, but it actually selected a tool that faces the wrong way for our needs and automatically defined the wrong side for facing because it tried to inherit those properties. The first thing we will do is change the tool. We will select the appropriate tool from our tool table, which is tool 12. We'll select the tool for the operation and go to job assignment now to delete this initial definition because it's not correct.

Instead, we will select this face and click on facing here, and now we can see it has the correct positioning, but the orientation is still wrong. We can fix that by clicking on this arrow here. We also need to specify how much material will be faced off. Under cycle params, I think we will set this to about eight millimeters just to be safe, and we will set the pass count to about six, which should be fine.

That looks like it will do a nice clean job of facing off all that material. However, there is a slight issue; the final facing pass will clear off this stub, but it might be a bit messy and could involve some tearing. So I will go back to that first drilling operation and push it all the way through the part instead of just having three millimeters from the drill tip compensation. If we go back to setup stage one now, under the first hole machining, we will go to job assignment.

We will double-click on this, turn off drill tip compensation, and set the height to 80 millimeters because I know the tool is long enough to go all the way through the part. I'll click OK on that. Now we will recalculate that job. Give it a second; we can see everything has been relinked properly.

Let's go back to the lathe facing setup now, and yes, that's all the way through, meaning we don't have to deal with any overhang or excess material. It may seem minor, but this is the kind of thing that prevents loud bangs in your lathe and minimizes potential poor machining results. We will generate the toolpath for this current setup, and it seems to do everything we ask of it. Let's quickly simulate that, and running it looks good to me.

The only reason it hasn't cleared out this plug is that we haven't re-simulated the whole thing. I will go back to machining and recalculate all these operations now. We'll go back into simulation, reset, and simulate up to the current operation. You can see now how it's visibly drilled through.

Let's quickly re-run that to ensure we're happy with the results, and lo and behold, that looks pretty good to me. Now we will go back into machining, and the penultimate thing we want to do is finalize that grooving here. We'll go to add operation and lathe, and select OD grooving again. The default tool we have is perfectly fine; there are no clearance issues.

However, we need to define the space we are grooving, so let's move these handles again and set the finish handle. I will flip this around. It should go from out coming in, and we should now recalculate this toolpath. That looks like it will give us a good grooving path, but we'll simulate again just to be sure.

Wait for it to change the tool; there we go, I'm quite happy with that. The final thing we need to do now is clean up this last outer space here. We'll do that with another roughing OD pass because it includes a built-in finishing pass that achieves a good surface finish. So lathe and OD roughing once again.

As we can see, it automatically tried to default to the previous OD roughing tool and is coming from the wrong direction again. We want to change that tool and set it to tool 12 that we have here. We'll select the tool for the operation and define the area it is machining. We want it to go from here to here and flip the order in which it machines.

The last thing we will set is under cycle params; we want to ensure it machines all this material away evenly. We'll click on check workpiece again, and now we can see it does passes going all the way down. We'll generate this and simulate, quickly running that to see how it looks, which is pretty much exactly what we expected. Now this finalizes our project, so let's quickly reset and regenerate everything.

Then we'll re-simulate everything at high speed to ensure it behaves as we expect. As this progresses, I'm quite happy with the results we're seeing so far. This concludes the actual machining processes in this series of videos, and in the last video, we'll cover the exporting of the G-code to the machine, so I shall see you in the next one. Thank you.