Best Strategy To Model and Drill 93 x 69 Holes (Air Hockey Table)?

[techshopjim]

Hello!

I'm building a vacuum hold-down box for our CNC router, kind of like an air hockey table.  I'm trying to model an array of 0.125" holes, spaced 0.25" apart on the X and Y axes.  There are 69 holes on X, and 93 holes on Y, so a total of 6,417 holes.

I started out trying to do the rectangular pattern of 0.125" diameter holes in Sketch, but it really bogged Fusion 360 down, giving me the Mac beachball of death for 20 minutes before I gate up (this is on a new fully-loaded Mac Pro).  I found a post here that mentioned that feature patterns is much more efficient than sketch patterns.

So I modeled one hole with a circle sketch and extruded it through to create the hole.  Then I selected that extrude feature and did a rectangular pattern with that.  It seemed a bit snappier, and took about 5 minutes of beachball before it came back to life.  Then it was very responsive.

However, when I went into CAM to set up the drill operation, I chose 2D Drill, and used the feature to select all holes with the same diameter, and clicked on the first hole.  The beachball spun for about 15 minutes, but then finished.

I feel like I'm doing this the wrong way.  Is there a better strategy for modeling and drilling arrays of holes like this?

Thanks!

[jeff_strater]

Hi @techshopjim,

Good choice to not use sketch pattern to do this.  As you found out, sketch pattern for large instance counts can be very slow.  So, creating one hole and and patterning it is the correct approach.  Additionally, there are several choices for type of pattern:  Face pattern, and several types of feature pattern.  For this usage, I would recommend a simple Face pattern.  That will be the fastest to compute, and should work for this usage.

Unfortunately, I am not a CAM expert, so I cannot comment on the best strategy for the 2D Drill operations.  You might want to ask this on the CAM forum:  computer-aided-machining-cam

Jeff

[Brady_Fulton · Accepted solution]

One more possible solution would be to pattern the CAM operation instead of the sketch or feature.

Here's a link to a quick vid:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-explore/caas/video/youtube/watch-v-h5h0NYUkk...

[LibertyMachine]

EDIT. Didn't read all the posts. Disregard

[techshopjim]

That was the solution...create a pattern in CAM!  That is very cool!

However, I am noticing that you can only make up to 1,000 items in the pattern before the patterning starts to truncate along the other axis.  You can try this by doing a quick drill operation, then make 100 across on X in the pattern, and 10 on Y.  That works, but if you try to increase X to 101, or Y to 11, the pattern will be truncated.

This is a pain because I have to copy the pattern a bunch of times to get the output file.  Can this limit be removed?

Thanks!

[Anonymous]

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