Tapping using a floating tap holder question

[agordon]

I'm working on a fixture plate for my mill that will need a lot of tapped holes.  My mill does not support rigid tapping, but I can control the spindle speed within +-50 RPM, and so can use a floating tap holder in Ma$terCam.

I have not used a floating tap holder in F360.  I'm looking at tapping 0.5" x 13 holes, 1.00 deep.  

I can select a tap in the Drilling setup, but how do I set the Z feed rate to match the spindle speed so the quill descends at the correct feed to tap the thread?

It looks like F360 assumes a rigid tapping setup ...

[Fueler]

The Drill cycle called Tapping is the one you want.

Hold the mouse over any of the selections and a pop window shows up explaining which is what.

[agordon]

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@Fueler wrote:

The Drill cycle called Tapping is the one you want.

Hold the mouse over any of the selections and a pop window shows up explaining which is what.

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Are you saying that the following "hover menu" allow selection of the z-axis decrement per rev of the spindle?  If so, please let me know how.  It appears to offer 4 tapping cycles, and none of them allow for incremental control of the Z axis.

[Fueler]

Sure it does.

Select tapping.

Click on the heights tab. 

Set your top and bottom heights.

Same as if you were doing this on a manual machine.

If a dead bottom hole you naturally have to give yourself enough extra drill depth to allow the slow down and reverse time. 

Do a search on this forum for tapping. You have to have your tool set up right or risk a do over.    I think that might be the question you are asking.

Might want to practice on a blank first. I did and ironed out my errors. 

[agordon]

I'm not sure that I have made clear that my mill DOES NOT support rigid tapping.  So, I have to set the spindle speed very carefully, and define the feed per rev (or per tooth in MasterCam, which sets taps as 1 tooth tools).  See example below from MasterCam X7 ...

In F360, I get the following option for tool parameters, 

And, the cycle control doesn't offer much either ...

Here is a comparison of the posts (MC on the left):

Looks like the F360 rate is twice that of MC (I'm not a G-code expert however!)

[agordon · Accepted solution]

It looks like Fueler is right.

The default RH Tapping cycle does support tapping using a floating tapping holder.

With the sample posts in hand, I checked the Dynapath manual, and noted that G4 is the correct operation for a floating tap holder (G8 is rigid tapping [begs another question: does F360 support rigid tapping?]).

And looking closely at the two code examples, it shows identical feed rates for both operations, so MasterCam and Fusion 360 gave exactly the same outcome (although Mastercam offers greater opportunity to customize the settings, which for a standard machine tap, isn't needed in this instance).