A couple of simple questions about CNC

[lemelman]

I've designed a somewhat complicated model comprised of many components, two of which are candidates for simple CNC work. I have access to a small, primitive, home built, CNC miller, and have been watching the Lars Christensen "Introduction to CNC" series on YouTube.

Question 1. Lars mentions that Fusion ships with the Inventor HSM Editor, but I can't find it on my system. Where is it?

Question 2. How do I isolate the components from my assembly so I can manufacture them? Even if I select only one, when I enter the Manufacture environment I get the complete assembly.

[HughesTooling]

Answer to question one, Fusion's never come with the HSM editor so not sure why Lars said it did. You could try NC Corrector.

Question 2. The first thing you should do in the CAM workspace is create a setup and select the body you want to machine and set its datums.

Mark

[Anonymous]

HSM Works (which comes with a F360 license) is delivered with HSM Edit.  You need to have an active solidworks or Inventor license to be able to take advantage of it though.  I use it every day and love it.. It is the same as Cimco Edit which is probable the best editor out there (industry standard) but is not free otherwise. 

[lemelman]

Thanks Mark, NC Corrector works well and I managed to create the tool-path I wanted. What I couldn't do was to isolate the component within the manufacture environment - all the rest of the assembly makes it very confusing. I had to resort to hiding the unwanted parts before entering manufacture - which is very tedious because I have to unhide them when switching back to design.

Am I doing it wrong?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

If select the part in the assembly you want to work on it will underline it in the assembly tree on the left. if you hover over the part number/name in the tree a white dot will appear to the right of the name. if you select it it will turn everything else in the assembly translucent so that its focused on the part you are working on.. This can still be distracting by eye though..

I usually make it a point to just save a copy of the individual component as its own part file and work only on 1 part at a time in manufacture space.. This also frees up a bunch of RAM on your computer by not having to have the entire assembly open.  If you right click on a part name you can "save copy as" and save it to your folder the assembly is in.. Here we assign our own part numbers to any part we manufacture anyways so I go ahead and save a copy of everything with our part number for reference as well.  Only caveat is that it will not be linked to the original assembly so changes to the parts will not auto update. 

[lemelman]

Thanks Chak257.

[HughesTooling]

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@Anonymous wrote:

  If you right click on a part name you can "save copy as" and save it to your folder the assembly is in.. Here we assign our own part numbers to any part we manufacture anyways so I go ahead and save a copy of everything with our part number for reference as well.  Only caveat is that it will not be linked to the original assembly so changes to the parts will not auto update. 

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You would be better off using Derive to create the copy then it's still linked to the assembly.

For smaller assemblies I keep everything in the one design file. A quick way to make just one component visible is before switching to the CAM workspace, double click the body you want to machine, right click and select Isolate from the right click menu. When you go back to the design workspace just right click in the work area and pick unisolate.

Mark