Sign in to watch this lesson

Hi, so we're now going to take a look at dealing with these side tab features. There are going to be a couple of 2D contouring operations along with some potentially awkward transitions, so let's get ahead of those, shall we? So first off, we're adding a new group, and we're going to call this side features. We are now going to add our first 2D contouring operation because I would like to get the outline of these sorted first.

So let's go over to the correct tool, which is the cylindrical mill 6mm, and let's define our curve. So I'm going to double-click this, and I'm going to take off these little fillet bits here because we're going to do some fancier stuff with surfacing later on, which will clean those up. So that's our curve. We probably need to set the orientation of the correct axes for it to look good first, though, so 90, I'm not quite sure why that's gone a bit strange, so let's delete that and re-assert that.

That's probably due to the tool orientation being off; it just got a bit confused. So we're going to set the basics of our top level and bottom level now, but we are going to tune this slightly. I don't like the razor-thin onion skin that it suggests it leaves behind here, so I'm going to give it a little bit extra off the bottom there. I'm also going to give it a little bit extra on the top so it can transition into cutting because we're going to be using a helical path to achieve this, and I don't want any complaints about ramp angles being too high.

So we've got a nice long lead-in for it. So to do this, now that we've got these core top and bottom values, we're going to go to strategy, and we're just going to manipulate them by 2mm each way. So 152 and 140, we're now going to set that to helical machining, and we're going to generate the toolpath. Now there is something here which you can just about make out if we look dead on like this at the moment, which is going to cause us a problem.

It may not be enough to report it, but it will be enough to see it, whereby the tool will get too close to this surface on this pass, and we're going to simulate this now just so we can see that. So if we go to try this out now, see the tool comes round, and there you go, it's just started engaging with the material and that should cut through nice and clean. So give that a second to finish what it's doing, and yeah, there's our problem, and it does give us a gouge error; it just touches our surface there, which is not really ideal. So we could either modify the curve or select a different curve, or we can actually trim the toolpath slightly, which is what we're going to do.

It's a much more elegant way of doing it. So under the bottom end of links and leads, I do apologize, my memory is not what it could be. Under exit overlap and entry overlap is what we're looking for. So we're going to set that to minus four on both features because what this does is it's a negative overlap.

So the overlap itself suggests that it will push that toolpath a little bit further along the curve than the curve is selected; it will just carry on like that, but we obviously want the opposite effect. So I'm going to generate the toolpath now, and you can see the difference immediately and see how the toolpath terminates up here, whereas the curve terminates down here. So that should give us the tidied-up effect that we need. We've still got a complaint here about the gouge at the part, which is fine.

We're going to go into simulation now, and we're going to reset that node status, reset, simulate up to current, and then we're going to press run. I'm going to speed this up a little bit because we can now see how we've got a totally clean toolpath with no gouges at the end. Don't worry too much about these corners here. We are actually going to be cleaning that up later on anyway in some of the surfacing operations that we're doing, so that's not a major concern.

So the next thing that we need to do is I want to cut these holes out of the tabs, and finally, I'd like to cut these holes out as well. So I'm going to just clone this 2D contouring operation because we want the same height levels involved. So let's duplicate that, and we're going to change the curve. So we're going to grab that curve and that curve, and those are our toolpaths.

However, we are going to have to turn off that overlap setting because that's not helping us here. So let's set that to zero on both counts and regenerate that toolpath. Now that should hopefully give us a nice and clean functional toolpath. So let's take a look.

It's a little bit strange over there, so let's take a look at what's going on over there, shall we? So in this curve, there's the problem. Turns out we didn't select the whole curve properly. So the moral of the story: never ever rush your selections.

So I'm going to add that curve now again, and we can see we've now got a full ellipse there, which is what we want, so let's regenerate that, and that looks how it should. So just a sanity check, we'll very quickly go through, yeah, that's fine. Okay, now the last part is to grab these holes. So let's do so.

So we're going to add operation, and I'm going to do this with 2D contouring. We can do it with pocketing; we can do it with hole machining, but we've been working 2D contouring so far, and it's nice and quick and easy, so we might as well. There's no right or wrong way to set up a machining operation, as many of you will know; it's just a case of go with what works for you. These are purely examples.

So I'm going to grab those curves, and we're going to define the top level, and I'm not going to bother trying to grab a cylindrical surface to set as a static plane because that doesn't make much sense. So under strategy, we're going to set the bottom level to I think 10 should fit. So let's try 10, and yeah, that gives us enough leeway there. I'm going to set the top level to 22 because we're going to be doing the helical machining pass again and I think we can also, we might end up getting a complaint about the ramp angle being too high here because of the purely helical path; it might have an issue with that.

So I'm going to set the depth of cut to 50% as well just to see if that makes the difference. So we're going to generate that toolpath now, and it doesn't really seem to have done much in terms of tightening up the spiral as such and we've already got a complaint coming up here about the ramp angle being too high. Now again, realistically, this is an example job. But also, more to the point, these kinds of helical cuts are generally okay in my experience, at least depending upon the kind of tool you've got.

So I'm going to assume that this 6mm end mill is capable of being used as a slotting drill, but yeah, for the sake of argument, I'm not super fussed about it. So I'm going to turn off check for plunges because yeah, there's not a huge amount of points in fussing about it, you know. I am also going to go to links and have a look at the safe level because that is kind of a ridiculous distance. So we're going to go 10mm from the origin; I'm going to set that to the origin, and then we're going to go to, let's drag this plane down; I think 40mm from the origin should be more than sufficient.

So let's click on generate, and no, immediately we've got a transition through, so that's not good. So let's click on, so let's take a look at turning on check workpiece and maybe setting the transitions to around workpiece in this as well just to try and clean that up. So we'll regenerate the toolpath there, and no, we still have this transition, so we've got an approach set to short from previous; it's not really ideal for what we want, so we can go with avoid collisions instead. And if that doesn't work, we can always just reset our initial safe plane, but that has in fact worked, which is good.

So we can now check that, and let's click on run, and we can see we've got a fairly clean and controlled boring operation there. Cue obvious jokes about being boring. So now that we have defined all of these, we really want to mirror them on the other side of the part, so let's create a multiply group operation. And we are going to need to feed each of these parts in there.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that we've got some sudden red errors on a previous operation, partially as a result of redefining our links and leads policy there. That does happen because it will unlink a lot of the stuff that leads into it. It's not the end of the world; it doesn't mean that your previous operations are now suddenly utterly corrupt or anything like that; it just kind of messes with the flow of the background simulation a little bit. The obvious fix is basically to regenerate all of the toolpaths and run a quick simulation after resetting the node statuses, and I promise you it will come up green.

We'll check it in a second, but first things first, we're going to get everything into the multiply group here. Okay, so first one, second one, and third one, and third one. We are now going to set the approach and return to avoid collisions and we're going to set the transformation into a round array with an angle step of 180 degrees, and we're going to set the base coordinates to global. And that should allow us to generate the toolpath, which, with a bit of luck, should work just fine.

And unfortunately, we are getting a very strange transition through here, which is not really ideal, so let's take a look at resolving that, shall we? So we can adjust the links and leads of everything in the group characteristics here. So we can see that the first approach is greyed out, which means I don't think it's been calculated properly, and also not all of them are using that, so we're going to set that to avoid collisions. We are also going to turn on check workpiece for all of them and we're going to set our transitions to a round workpiece; even though it was set, it's always good to reset it just to really hammer the point home to the simulation engine.

And once that recalculates, we should hopefully start to see. So we are going to set the safe level; it's currently 40mm from the origin. If we want to go full belt and braces, we can actually set that to 20mm from the part, but it does mean that stuff is going to really jump away, which again, not the end of the world, just means you've got a bit more time transitioning between elements. So if we do that now, you can see that we've got a nice clean jump around there.

I don't see anything that looks like a particularly awkward transition, although we do have one over here, which is not really ideal. So let's set that safe level to 20mm from the part, and we'll bump up the safe distance to 40mm as well and we'll recalculate that just to make sure that we're skipping that last intersection, which now we are. And yeah, sure, it does mean that the tool does orbit around the actual component a fair bit, but better to be safe than sorry, and realistically, an extra 15 seconds moving through the air costs an awful lot less than replacing your tool every time you run the job. So we've now completed that, and in the next video, we are going to continue looking at dealing with some of the more complicated features in this.

We're going to make a start on the 5D surfacing. So I shall see you then.