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

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All right, so we're going to finish up the cleanup on this part now. We're going to do the mating surface finishing and then exterior contouring, and there's a small amount of non-planar work that we need to address as well. So we're now going to go back to the machining environment, and first, we're going to check the original face milling information that was there. So 87.

129 would be the top level that we'd normally be working to now. So if we now go back down and generate a new face milling operation. Happy to leave it with the 80 mil cylindrical mill; that's absolutely fine. So we're leaving zero stock, and we're setting that to 88 as the top level since that's what we were at before.

And we will change the sixth axis control, and we will now give that a second to generate the toolpath that it needs. Quickly go through the axis map just to divert ourselves from the problem that it throws. And that should now bring everything down to the green height that we need. So we're going to very quickly simulate this last path now.

Let's give it a second. Okay, and we are very, very slightly off the green height that we want. I'm going to quickly measure that difference. That's 36.

5 there. So realistically, that means that we want 86. 5 to be the final height. So that's what we're going to set now.

86. 5, and we'll recalculate that, and we'll re-simulate that just to make sure. Right, you can see here without even turning on the color comparison, we've got grey just peeking through the blue here. So this tells me that we're pretty much at the ideal height that we need to be at, which is great.

So just turn on verify compare. We've got a nice green setup there, so everything's within tolerances. That's perfect. So we're going to go back to machining now, and we are going to set up a 2D contouring path around the outside of here.

So we'll go 2D contouring, and we'll stick with the 20 millimeter cylindrical mill for now to give us some nice extra space to work with. We'll set the bottom layer to 51 millimeters just so there's a little bit of material to cut away with a more detailed contour path at the end. And we need to be able to generate a boundary path for this, and we can't use this top edge because that obviously doesn't account for these sections. And we can't use the bottom edge because there's clearly a cutaway there that we haven't accounted for previously.

So there is actually a trick that we can use at this point. If we go back into the model environment, we can grab the projected boundaries of the actual object. So if we do that now, we can see there's now this lovely curve here that's a perfect boundary range for the entire object itself. So we go back to the machining environment.

We grab that curve. We tell it that's the curve we want it to machine to. And we tell it that we want it to machine outside of that curve. We can now set that up as a toolpath, which should hopefully give us plenty to work with.

Start points and collision of failed safe distance test. Okay, so we go with helical machining; that should resolve that problem. If we now go with the axis map and sort that, we should be good to go. So we've now gone and cleared all of the requisite area surrounding the object; that's ideal for us.

So if we quickly simulate this just to double-check, we can see now that gives us enough clear space to be able to work with clearing up these blue regions that we need. So let's get on with that. So I am going to suggest that we go with a 3d complex plane again. Sorry, optimized plane even.

Not a complex plane. And we grab each of these relevant non-planar regions. We're not going to go all the way down the sides on them because we're going to be doing a profiling pass that will do that for us. But if we just grab each of these now, we'll do all the transitional sections.

I'm going to leave this side one for a second because that's going to take a little bit more work to achieve. But we set these as the faces that we want to machine. Okay, that's fine. That's all fine.

We've got the correct tool. We'll set this to fixed vector, and we click on generate toolpath and then do the obvious axis map element. Build the graph of the toolpath, and we now have these nicely cleaned up areas. So this means that we've now got all of these external non-planar surfaces covered.

That's great. We're going to do something similar for this, but we need to be aware of the fact that a there's no fillet here at the edge, and b this is actually a very, very shallow shape. So we can try adding it to what we've got here already just to see what it comes up with. It may be close enough, but it might also be that it starts to complain a bit.

If we have a look at the simulation results for this now, I'm confident that these are going to come up okay, but this is the bit that I'm unsure about. Okay, I stand corrected; that's actually pretty good. I will set up a contour to go through here just to clean this up, though, and we'll be doing a closer contour around all of this as well anyway, which should pretty much see us done with this project. So to set up the finishing contour around the actual piece, we are going to go with another 2d contour.

However, before we do that, I'd quite like to get this bit finished, so let's set up the 3d contour first and the curve that we're going to use is going to be the same one that defines the surface of this. Go with that, and that should give us a nice clean line. So that's the curve. We use the 5mm spherical mill as well; that's absolutely fine.

That's going from the outside, yeah, that should be okay. So we set that to fixed vector and run, and we just double-check the axis map in case there's anything it's complaining about. The toolpath, and we quickly simulate this at this point just to make sure that gives us a clean end result, which it should do. Okay, so this is the problem that I was worried about with this.

Basically, we end up with some very strange resolution around here, and we've got also this part where it's digging in along here. This is going to be a problem with contouring this however we do it, so realistically it might not be a bad idea for us to leave this for the moment or alternately we can probably try a different approach just machining along this edge, but as I say, it's something we should come back to in a bit. The contouring around the exterior profile, however, we can absolutely do. I'm going to delete this for now.

I'm going to set this here, and if we generate that toolpath now, we should get a nice clean result for the final finish. So we just rerun this; we'll see that we've got a few little bits here that need clearing up, but that's not the end of the world. Generally, all around, all is good. So the parts that we need to revisit, we need to look at this section here, and we need to look at these sections here.

Now the good thing is these sections here can all be addressed with the optimized toolpath. So let's do that now. So with the optimized plane, we can quite easily bring this down to here. So add those faces, and those might as well add those faces whilst we're at it, and then come around to these faces, and then finally these ones.

The quick recalculation of that; we should be okay. I'm thinking actually we might be able to get away with remachining like this on here. Let's try that. Regenerate that.

Allow it to have a think. Double-check the axis map just in case there's anything unexpected that's manifested, which it hasn't. This is great. So we build the graph, update the toolpath, and then if we go back into the simulation space and we reset the simulation and then simulate up to the current operation.

So this will take a minute, so I'm just going to pause the recording whilst it works it out. Okay, that's all gone back through without any problems. So we can now run the optimized plane and 3d contouring. So let's see if there's anything that needs to be cleared away.

Well, there's still some, so we're going to have to incorporate some of this plane as well in this just to really, really clean this up. However, over here, there's no problems, and no, there's just this tiny effect here, and this is looking drastically better already. There is still a small amount of extraneous ribbing there, which is not ideal, but for the moment, what we're looking to avoid is this red cutaway section. Now this actually happened as part of this planing motion here, I believe, so that's the reason for that.

That's just poor model definition, but this section here and these bits here, these can all be cleared. So if we go back now and we go back into the optimized plane section, yeah, it's clearly not going to complete it. So I think what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to add another 3d contouring in here. So if we duplicate this and we tell it that the lines we want it to correspond to are just these ones here.

So add that curve and add this curve as well. That should hopefully resolve the bulk of that. So yes, you can see how these are now drastically cleaned up. We'll do the same for these interior sections here as well.

We should see that pretty much done. So we define this curve as well, run that through. Okay, and then simulate these through. We've now got these nice and clean and in accordance with what we need, so that's ideal.

This is going to be a bit more of a fight. We'll try and follow the 3d curvature for some of it, but I think realistically we've probably reached the limit of what we can achieve on this for now as a three-axis operation. So we're running this small cleanup area here, and I think there's another one over here as well, and that will see this project pretty much done.