[Gregore]

Any one know why madcam will not let me pocket a 1.4mm hole with a 1.19mm end mill? It also will not let me profile that curve from the inside

[Jason Forbes]

It's likely a high Offset variable in the tool's setting. Could be too high of a setting when creating the toolpath. Double-check the Step Size or Ramp Approach settings and lower them. Pocketing works fine with the setting shown below.

Attachment 272458Attachment 272456

[svenakela]

Just made a test and it worked fine. Can you share your model?
What if you make a new simple model with a box with the same hole and try the same thing?

[svenakela]

It's likely a high Offset variable in the tool's setting. Could be too high of a setting when creating the toolpath. Double-check the Step Size or Ramp Approach settings and lower them. Pocketing works fine with the setting shown below.

Attachment 272458Attachment 272456

Might be but you can go pretty high on the values before they fail.

BTW, what version are in use here?

[Gregore]

Cut link distance was defaulted to 16, changed it back and now it works.


makes me wonder if I grabed another larger end mill already in madcam and just renamed and changed the parameters on the first page

Thanks

[Jason Forbes]

Might be but you can go pretty high on the values before they fail.

BTW, what version are in use here?

Version: 5.0.2015.226

[Gregore]

By the way what is a cut link distance and what does it do ?

[svenakela]

Cut link distance was defaulted to 16, changed it back and now it works.


makes me wonder if I grabed another larger end mill already in madcam and just renamed and changed the parameters on the first page

Thanks

Changed it back to what? If cut-link causes the pocketing to not happen, that sounds really odd.
Taken from the help file:
Maximum distance for traveling to the next tooolpath on the model without rapid traverse.

I did a new test and changed the cut-link to 16 and the hole was still processed. Are you sure you didn't change another value at the same time?

[Jason Forbes]

I'm un-able to find a problem when pocketing with any random value set in Cut-link distance.

[Gregore]

I changed 2 things on that window cut link and stock to leave, they were set to 16 for cut link and 2 for stock to leave In the actual pocketing window when it was not working I would change the stock to leave to zero as it was showing 2 . Maybe some how the 2mm in the " Other " tab was over riding the change in the pocketing window????? I do not understand why madcam has some quirks on my coputer that no one else gets.

I still can not get madcam to do a drive surface path from the bottom of a part no matter what I do it will not path to the depth I request it to.

It used to do it fine then one day after an upgrade last year it stopped doing it , now I have to flip the whole model and then go into the Gcode and type in the command to flip the 4th axis to 180
This is a snap shot of a 2 mm thick model with drive surface below and 3 mm chosen for depth , the settings are all the same as a tool path that runs with the same drive surface from the top the only thing that changes is I flip drive surface under and rerun drive surface but with same settings. It will also do this same thing if I run a drive surface from the side of the model.

Sorry picture is upside down

Attachment 272762

[Gregore]

Attachment 272764

This is a pic of drive surface on side of model with 8 mm depth light blue is tool path, you can see it has gone less than
1 mm

[svenakela]

I changed 2 things on that window cut link and stock to leave, they were set to 16 for cut link and 2 for stock to leave In the actual pocketing window when it was not working I would change the stock to leave to zero as it was showing 2 . Maybe some how the 2mm in the " Other " tab was over riding the change in the pocketing window?????

...

Well there you go, don't blame Cut Link as it was your Stock To Leave. That's not strange at all as the tool dialog will always override the cutting dialog.
Jason was on the right path.

The drive surface problem I can't quite understand what you are trying to achieve.
Can you make a new thread about that, attach an example model and describe what you can't do with it?

[svenakela]

Version: 5.0.2015.226

Sorry for that, I was looking for Gregore's version.

[Gregore]

That is good to know that the tool peramiters will over ride cutting dialogue .

Thanks ,

[Dan B]

Cut link distance is a user definable value that will allow you to control whether or not the tool retracts between toolpath sections. It is best illustrated by looking at how that setting can affect an engraving toolpath. In the following illustration you will see two extremes. In the first case, the value is set to 10mm. That means that any toolpath sections that are less than 10mm may not necessarily retract. This would be a problem when engraving. In the second case, I set the value to 0.01mm so that any gap larger than 0.01mm will force a retract.

Attachment 273672

I can think of some cases where you would like to minimize the number of retracts (a z-level remachine for example) so it would make more sense to have a larger value here.

Hopefully this helps,

Dan

[Cutter7]

I ran into a similar problem the other day. I tried to use pocketing to create a 0.6 inch hole with a 0.5 inch cutter. The problem is MadCam produced a tool path but it resulted in a 0.7 inch hole. With some experimenting I discovered that it will produce the correct path only if the ramp is set to zero. The correct hole can also be produced by using profiling. It would be better if the pocketing command gave an error rather than producing a tool path that looks correct but is actually too large. I found this out the hard way by cutting a part and discovering one hole was too large.

[Gregore]

I have not had the problem of the hole being too large but i have had a part that i had been working on for 10 hrs ruined because it cut a ramp into the part as it put the hole in , seemed odd that it would do that and that was when i discovered taking out the ramp when using cutters almost the same size as the pocket.

[svenakela]

I ran into a similar problem the other day. I tried to use pocketing to create a 0.6 inch hole with a 0.5 inch cutter. The problem is MadCam produced a tool path but it resulted in a 0.7 inch hole. With some experimenting I discovered that it will produce the correct path only if the ramp is set to zero. The correct hole can also be produced by using profiling. It would be better if the pocketing command gave an error rather than producing a tool path that looks correct but is actually too large. I found this out the hard way by cutting a part and discovering one hole was too large.

Do you still have that model and tool path? Can you reproduce that faulty hole?
You don't have to cut it, doing some measurements in Rhino and some mathematics will reveal if the path is too wide.

[Cutter7]

Do you still have that model and tool path? Can you reproduce that faulty hole?
You don't have to cut it, doing some measurements in Rhino and some mathematics will reveal if the path is too wide.

A simple model will reproduce it. A 1.0 inch cube with a 0.600 inch hole using a 0.500 cutter. It appears that if ramping is used, the smallest diameter tool path that will be produced is 0.200 inches. It should be 0.100 inches.

[svenakela]

Oooh... Spooky! That's a bad one. I could reproduce it too. The pocket is correct without Ramp Angle and too wide with a ramp. I'll e-mail JOM right away.