We have liftoff! Can you help me improve speed?

[thoreaubakker]

Hi All,
I'm milling 1.5" foam (48.5mm) on an X-Carve, sending 3D posts from Fusion to Easel.

Currently, I'm doing a pretty fast (4000mm /150" per minute) adaptive with 1/4" flat bit stepping down at 5mm, then a parallel pass with a ball nose. The problem is I have A LOT of parts to do and I'm looking to optimize. I'm making a big (7') Giraffe sculpture with 100s of slices, and currently one 1.5 " slice takes over a half hour with a tool change.

Could anyone take a look at my file (attached) and settings and tell me where I might save time? I tried skipping the path and going much slower with only the ball finishing pass (this is foam), which saved time, but it sounded slightly harder on the bit. Maybe there is some kind of minor clearing I can do with the ball so I don't have to change from flat to ball for the finishing? One thing I notice is that a lot of material is being cleared away in the roughing pass that probably doesn't need to be. I imagine if I made a drawing / border and changed the tool path to stay inside the path that might work, but that would involved custom drawings for every part right?

At this rate I'm going to spending 100's of hours cutting these parts before I can start finishing and laying up fiber glass. Anyone know of multi axis foam milling company at art student prices?  : )

p.s. Thanks @HughesTooling  for getting me back up and running last week with the tab thing (only selecting model in set up). That worked and I managed to pull some parts tonight.

[seth.madore · Accepted solution]

Your process and feeds don't look that bad. You do have a couple speeds set low (ramp and plunge)

How fast can your machine feed? That would be the first step. Second, I'd look at profiling all the stock to the silhouette of the part, greatly reducing how much wasted cutting you are doing. It's foam, the machine and tool should be fine.. You can accomplish this by jacking up your Rough and Fine Stepdown to greatly reduce the number of steps it's taking.

Just breaking it up like that knocked 4 minutes off of the job 🙂

Your Parallel is running across the top of the part, but is that needed? Of course, if you are actually taking a chip, you would want to keep that process. If you don't need to do that, swapping to a Scallop also nets you another 3 minutes

Dare I say it? But you could go with a massively rough 3D Adaptive and skip right over to the Scallop toolpath.... Doing that would drop you down to....14 minutes 😄

File attached

[thoreaubakker]

Hey @seth.madore  thanks for looking at the file and all the great tips.

I don't think the machine can go much faster (cleanly/safely), but I guess I can ramp up a little each night as I go.

You're right about the parallel over the top -- that's gotta go!

Can you clarify what you mean by "profiling all the stock to the silhouette of the part,"? Would that avoid the corner areas of the stock that are getting cut when they don't need to?

Also, in terms of the rough / fine step down, I think right now I'm at 5mm each time, breaking the stock into around 10 steps down. Are you thinking maybe I should go to 2 or 3 steps down? I did not even doing the rough pass last night and just going to parallel slowly, but it wasn't very clean and pushed the bit too much.

[thoreaubakker]

ps. one problem I forgot to mention:

After the roughing pass, the mill does an aggressive full plunge / on the tab sides of the box, to cut away the area around the tabs I guess. This puts a lot of load on the mill, much more than running it earlier.

Do you think this is because I haven't added stock offset to the part? And If I add offset, it's going to then take a lot longer to cut everything away right? (again returning to your suggestion of profiling the part earlier).

The red area in image is where the mill plunged all the way down through the 38.5mm stock.