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Hello there. In this video, we're going to set up our facing operations along with the outer diameter roughing with the finishing pass and the grooving operations to follow the profile of the shape as well. First things first, we're going to define our facing operation. To do so, we're going to go to the add operations tab, click on the drop-down option here, and select lathe facing.

By default, this picks the generally correct tool that we want, so we're just going to check the tool setting here, and we can see it's tool number 5. That's correct; it's the right kind of tool, and this is all based on the tool table that we've already imported, so I'm quite happy that that's entirely appropriate. However, we can see from this path now that this isn't quite right. Initially, it's going to be removing about three and a half millimeters in one pass and then the following one and a half in the next, which isn't really what we wanted to do.

So we're going to go to the cycle parameters and set the axial thickness to four millimeters and the pass count to five just to ensure we've got enough going on there. In fact, I think we're going to increase that beyond four millimeters; let's go with seven millimeters there. Yeah, that gives us a nice enough looking pattern, taking it off in five passes, doing a nice clean job, and we'll also go with a finish pass leaving 0. 3 of a millimeter.

This will then be removed in a final operation. Now we're going to click on generate toolpath of the current operation, and we can see how it comes in, takes off the first, retracts, rinses, and repeats, which is exactly what we wanted to do. However, for the sake of sanity checking, I will always insist on simulating each operation as I've completed it. So we're going to click on simulation now, and as we can see, we've got the raw stock in the shape that we're expecting it to be.

I'm going to click on run now, which starts the simulation, as you can see from the spindle turning there, and we've got our tool coming into play now. It takes a slightly heavy first pass, but nothing too serious, and as we can see, everything is moving exactly as expected; this is all good. It's generally safe to say that once we're satisfied with how things are turning out, we can usually speed things up a little bit to save ourselves some time, and there's the finished pass. Excellent!

Now that I'm happy with that and we've got green nodes on that operation, we can go back to the machining environment at this point. Now we've got a couple of options for how we're going to proceed next. Ideally, I would like to set up a roughing operation to clean this all the way back to around this point so that we can sort out our threading operation and make sure that everything's okay. However, at this stage, I'm going to do a grooving operation to create some relief for the roughing pass.

If you think about it, if we use this tool here and it comes up to this point, due to the way it wants to default leading in and out, it's going to be cutting quite heavily into the leftover material here, so we want to make sure that's clean and easy and doesn't require any extra work. To do so, I'm going to add an operation, and under lathe again, we're going to go to OD grooving. We've already got a grooving tool defined. You can see that it's automatically trying its best to get absolutely everything.

This is the point at which we need to start looking at the start and finish tags. These are defined with this little flag here and this little circle here. If we bring these over to just cover the region that we're working on, that's ideal. We can now generate the toolpath of the current operation, and we can see we've got a nice clean pass through for that entire region, which is exactly what we want.

I'm going to simulate this just to make sure that everything is as advertised. We can leave the previous operation already simulated; that's all good. We'll slow this down a little bit, click on run again, and we should see the grooving tool coming into play now. There we go; it's a nice clean grooving operation.

Perfect. That also gives us the necessary relief to be able to do the next operation, which is going to be our roughing operation for this section here. We're now going to go back into the machining environment and add another operation. We're going to go to lathe and OD roughing, and again we are going to define these start and finish points.

We're going to move this one here, and we can leave this one here; it doesn't do any harm to just gently kiss over this again. It shouldn't be taking off any material because that's already down to its finish point. However, we can see that these operation paths here don't actually cover the full range of the material that's in play. To combat this, we can tell it that it needs to look at the entire workpiece to see what it needs to machine away, as opposed to just looking at the final profile of the contour that it's after.

We can turn on check workpiece under cycle parameters, and we can automatically see that this has now generated a series of toolpaths that are completely optimal for this. I'm now going to click on generate toolpath again, and we now have a nice set of toolpaths that clean off all of that excess workpiece material first. Again, we very quickly simulate what we need to see. We just click on run there and see what it's got to say.

This looks pretty much exactly as we're intending, so let's just speed this up a touch, and generally, that's looking good so far. It's leaving on a little bit of excess, which is going to be covered in this final finishing pass. There we go, and that seems to be pretty much ideal, which is great. We've got one final operation that we want to do in this particular set.

I would like to cut this tiny little relief groove here for the benefit of our threading pass that's going to happen in a subsequent video. We'll go back to add operation, and we're going to do one final OD grooving operation. We click on that; we've got our grooving tool already set up and ready again, and we're just going to move the start and finish handles one more time to make sure they're exactly where we need them to be. Which is right here, and we're now going to click on generate toolpath again, and that should clean that out in a single pass.

If we go back to simulation and run, there we go; nice and clean pass there. That finishes off the first of the operations that we need to do, which is pretty much perfect for what we're after. In the next video, we're going to go over threading and hole machining, so I shall see you in the next one.