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Store trimmed toolpath for later use

Store trimmed toolpath for later use

Shaft & Holder avoidance is super useful, but unfortunately once you avoid an area, there's no good way to accurately pick up the remaining toolpath. This is particularly true for finishing operations, where you really want the tool to pick up at the exact position where the previous tool left off. The only method i'm aware of is using rest machining to detect remaining material, and it's just not precise enough. It also comes with unnecessarily long computation times, as in theory we already know what needs to be machined to a great degree of precision; it was already calculated and dismissed, so spending a good degree of computation trying to find it seems silly.

 

It would be excellent if the trimmed toolpath itself were stored and made accessible to future operations. That way, you could generate the exact toolpath you want without Shaft & Holder, enable Shaft & Holder for the initial tool, then come back with a longer tool, or multi-axis tilting, in precisely the areas that were trimmed.

8 Comments

@Rob.Lockwood This would only work for exactly the same style of tool of course.

Rob.Lockwood
Advisor

Yep, good caveat to add in there; But in general, two of the more common scenarios when trimming are that you'll come back with a longer tool that can reach, or use the exact same tool with tilting to reach.

 

The tilting scenario may seem like an odd choice, as you could simply apply shaft/holder avoidance to the whole toolpath, but the result isn't the same and the calculation time suffers massively when applying tilting to the whole toolpath.. so there's still a good benefit to realize there.

Rob.Lockwood
Advisor

 Oh-- and, the kicker.. I find the likelihood of a toolpath requiring a rewind increases dramatically when covering a large area with shaft + holder enabled, and that I can often get around that by staying 3x + trimming and using shaft+holder avoidance only where it's been trimmed.

@Rob.Lockwood and here it is again the need for a solid machine configuration. Smiley Sad

Why that has been neglected for so long is a still weird to me.

 

But usually when I can't reach I actually go back with a different tool. It a longer version of the same tool would have worked I would most probably have done all of the path with it. Something with consistency and surface finish.

al.whatmough
Alumni

@fonsecr can you chime in here.

 

 

al.whatmough
Alumni
Status changed to: Future Consideration

@Rob.Lockwood I like the idea.  That said, how would the result from this differ from using Rest machining "from tool"

 

 

Rob.Lockwood
Advisor

@al.whatmough - my HSMWorks is tied up at the moment, so I can't actually test this, correct me if i'm wrong..

 

I believe "From Tool" assumes a tool with infinite reach and no tool holder, and so wouldn't properly leave the correct rest-material when compared to a toolpath being trimmed via Shaft + Holder. 

al.whatmough
Alumni

Correct you are - we would need from tool to take into account the holder.

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