Support for drilling through tubes

[narzinskin]

I have submitted this before but want to add to the idea station to gather support. 

When Drilling in square tubing, if you select two or more holes concentric to each other on the top and bottom layer of the tubing, it continues to feed in between both layers wasting a lot of time.  it would awesome if the software would recognize there are two different holes (meaning it has two different hole tops and hole bottoms) and rapid in between them. It should only feed in between the holes if merge hole segments is checked. 

[cj.abraham]

Why not make two drilling operations for the two holes? One for the top and one for the bottom.

[matthewgowan]

I've been having trouble with a similar application. You can't really make multiple drilling op's because ideally you want it to feed (all be it a fast feed, usually between 1000mm/min to 3000mm/min) in the air space, and still retract to the top z plane to clear the swarf from the cavity. The application I was having trouble with is following up a solid carbide drill, with a long hss drill, where I drill down as deep as I can with the solid carbide, feed into the hole at F1000, and drill with the hss from 2mm behind where the solid carbide drill ended up, retracting fully out of the hole to clear chips. This method works well for me extending drilled holes from 5 x D down past 30 x D sometimes. Past 30 x D the retract feedrate really needs reduced, as well as reducing the peck depth, the deeper you get. Heidenhian has cycl 205 to cope with this, using starting depth, but for the life of me cannot get my post to output a meaningful value to this, as I don't have enough inputs from the cam. My suggested fix for this would be to do as some cam systems do, and give the user an option to either use a canned cycle, or output straight code as a drilling cycle. This would allow Inventor to define custom drilling cycles way beyond what is currently avaliable in standard drilling, boring, reaming cycles etc. Many thanks, Matthew.

[Greg_Haisley]

My Brother CNC TC-S2D machine even supports this with a tube drilling cycle - G181 code. Where I is the first drill depth, and J is the start depth for the next hole. To bad HSMWorks doesn't support this. Not a real big time saver, but prevents the machine from rapiding thru the first hole 3 times if you include the first retract then the second hole approach height then the last retract. 

Development could do this fairly easily if they wanted to. Output the long code version instead of the canned cycle. May have a problem recognizing the second hole because of the shadow issue that HSMWorks has with other issues. IDK.

[Steinwerks]

The shadow issue is a stock issue though, and doesn't affect 2D paths (of which all the drilling operations are) which are taken directly from the model. This would be pretty cool though as we drill through a fair number of square tubes and having it output automatically would be nifty. 

[al.whatmough]

@porsbym  can you comment on this one.

[lenny_1962]

All you need to do is select the bottom hole face and where you set the start of the hole, set it to model top, not hole top.

it will then start drilling above the part with your pecks.

you can do this for many opts, like bore

[al.whatmough]

@len_1962 I believe what @nnarzinski wants is to peck dill the top of the tube - feed to middle and peck that then feed to the bottom and peck that.  

It is a very good and valid request.

[vernonkleinsasser]

make a drilling cycle that is capable of drilling through one wall of the tubing and then rapid down to the next wall where it slows down again to cutting speed.  Hypermill has has something like this that is based off the stock model . this cycle can save a lot of time on production runs.

[al.whatmough]

This appears to be the same request as this one:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/hsm-ideas/support-for-multiple-depths-in-drilling-operations/idi-p/650...

I am corrected in that assessment?

[vernonkleinsasser]

Yes, it is pretty much the same idea just not very well described.

[al.whatmough]

Merged two Ideas as they are effectively the same thing.

[vernonkleinsasser]

what is the time table for this to be revued and hopefully worked on? this function is the only reason we didn't go with you guys a couple years back and would switch as soon as you could develop it. 

[grk3010]

the solution that christopher.abraham proposed works, but wastes time on a production machine, especially one with slower rapid movements as it has to go around to each hole multiple times with the same tool.

Adding this functionality would be huge for companies that drill a lot of tubing and/or extrusions in a production environment.

[matthewgowan]

I could see allot of benefit in drilling to deep length diameter ratios. Using differnet length drills to follow each other. Feeding down to where the previous drill finished at a fast feed, and pecking from there, retracting to the stock top. It would be easy to implement with post processors by outputting the custom drilling cycle as linear moves. I'd also like to see a drilling wizard at some point, that can cope with tool orientation in 3+2 machining, doing some form of feature recognition.

[al.whatmough]

@matthewgowan what you are asking for is "gun drilling"  that is already supported.

@grk3010 This is on out list to review. 

[matthewgowan]

Gin drilling doesn't seem to support pecking though, nessessary with non through spindle drills.

[al.whatmough]

@matthewgowan  I see now.  Why don't you create a new "idea" for peck drilling support with gun drilling.

(keep in mind - this means it would need to be expanded coded.  Unless the Heidenhein cycle now supports this)

[matthewgowan]

I would use this functionality on both fanuc, and Heidenhain, so expanded cycles would be nessessary. I didn't think gun drilling would be the right function for this. In gun drilling you usually feed in, spindle on slow to depth, then coolant, and spindle on full drilling speed, I thought it was more for use with dedicated, proper gun drills, and through spindle coolant drills?

[matthewgowan]

I thought this would be more aptly solved by introducing a proper custom drilling cycle, with additional user definable planes, and the ability to add multiples of these at different depths, rather than just patching a function which works perfectly as it is to do something it wasn't meant to.

[al.whatmough]

@matthewgowan  I see what you are saying  - you see this as a "modular" drilling operation.

Almost like a pattern that could have multiple drilling operation that go from one cycle to the next without a retract.

IE

From Z 0.0 to Z -0.5  - Peck Drill

From Z 0.5 to Z -1.5  - Drill (decreased RPM increased feed)

From Z -1.5 to Z -2.0 - Peck Drill

This will take some thought for how to wrap this up well in the UI