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A short list of Fusion Turning features that either don't exist or don't work properly
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First, what happened to the idea station for Fusion? Did that get taken down or moved somewhere? I did actually look before posting but couldn't find anything.
Anyway, here are a number of things that frequently trouble us with Fusion, primarily with turning albeit some mill-related stuff (using a Nakamura lathe with live tooling and Y axis):
- Lathe tool and holder definitions, in the rare instances that they exist, suck across the board.
- Live tool holders don't exist at all and there are no real workaround options for them. Need to be able to have the post determine whether the tool holder should go forwards or backwards
- Lack of associativity between cloud and document level tool libraries makes it seemingly impossible to actually keep on top of lathe tools.
- Can't specify to force C axis or Y axis output at the Operation level. Can do it in the post, but it affects all operations that way, and it should just be a tick box in the Operations menu.
- Form/step drills don't exist as a tool type. Can use a form mill for drilling but doesn't simulate properly.
- If you use a drilling op with an end mill, for some reason "feed per revolution" tickbox disappears and it outputs in feed/min.
- No form tools or solid carbide turning tool profiles exist.
- Can't specify feed rate by line segment. This is quite annoying for things like grooving or anything where you're using a sharp corner (or very small TNR) for a chamfer. Fanuc MGi lets you do this kind of thing at the control segment by segment - it's both faster AND far more powerful than Fusion for turning.
- Threads (modeling, drawings and CAM) are universally terrible. Besides not allowing custom thread sizes, the Major/Minor diameters don't reflect reality and can't be controlled. Nothing gets automatically calculated except the major of male threads and minor of female threads. No mention of pitch diameters exists. Specification of turned or thread-milled dimensions is done very indirectly (as a radial offset from the Fusion-generated major/minor diameter) with no option to simply tell it "this is the final diameter the tool must reach" or "this is the pitch diameter I want". We do a lot of aluminum work where parts get anodized after machining, which requires specific allowances for thread dimensions. All of this has to be done manually to get around the roadblocks that Fusion creates.
- Threading (or in our case thread chasing) with a single point turning tool doesn't work properly if you specify only one pass. It decides that the cycle time for that operation will be some 10 figure number of seconds.
- Threading clearance radius doesn't work if you just give it a diameter input (at least, if the diameter is smaller than the stock diameter). It does work if you select a surface and then choose to offset from that.
- Would be nice if there was some option to link thread chasing to the initial threading pass for single point threading, so that if anything is adjusted, both are updated. Kind of like a pattern system, but where the thread chase op is automatically generated using the same values but with only one pass, and it asks you to put a thread clip turning op in between the two. For single point threading it's pretty common to turn/thread/clip/chase and it'd be sweet to have some automated cycle for that.
- Machine definitions for turning may as well not exist. You select a whole lot of input data and absolutely nothing comes of it. It should let you determine which direction positive Z is for each spindle, as well as which direction the C axis rotates for that machine. Doing it in the post is a friggin nightmare.
- For some reason when posting stuff out using a post that's in a linked Google Drive folder, certain values revert to random things that are utterly inexplicable to me. For example, we have a custom property called PickoffLength for automating the stock transfer between spindles. The default value that's saved in the post is 5mm. If I set it to 7mm and post a program, the next time I come back to repost the same program it's changed the value to 20mm for no reason I can determine (it shows up blue as though it's been modified from the default value, but it hasn't by me!). This is obviously extremely dangerous. I want the computer to automatically check my work, not require manual checking of the computer's work when it's repeating the same thing it was just asked to do!
- Most Fanuc based machines have servo torque detection options, for example to check whether a tool still exists or not. Would be nice to have some way to command it to do that through CAM (kind of like probing) without having to manually input it each time.
All of the above are things I think can be addressed without setting the world off its axis, but I have a couple of BIG suggestions that might be huge projects:
- Lathe simulation incl turret would be nice. Be really good if you could 3D-scan the inside of your machine and have it automatically determine your tool stickouts etc to detect collisions.
- How hard would it be to have a reverse post processor that takes in your modified-at-the-control program, imports it back into Fusion and actually corrects the CAM programming to match it? Because there are many, many things that Fusion simply cannot do with turning, that we do by hand instead, and there is a lot of fine-tuning that happens at the control because changing a feed rate there takes 2 seconds intead of 10 mins to adjust the program, repost, re-send to machine etc, but we want to bring it back into CAM so that the template can be used for other similar parts. Or at least some kind of version control would be nice.
