I'm going to interject another comment since I'm still having issues comprehending this R0 thing.
The Fadal manual clearly states "The I plane is the last Z position before the cycle line." That I understand.
Then the manual states "The R0 plane is the plane where the tool will begin to feed into the material. This location must be below or equal to the I plane". It also defines R0 as "the minimum clearance plane". (Smid calls it "Rapid to start point". It seems to me that R0 can be established such that the tool rapidly retracts to any Z position as long as it isn't above the I plane. Right? Even the crude sketch in the manual shows it above the work surface, not what I would call "begin to feed into the material". I know I may be splitting hairs here but I tend to take things very literally.
Now to the big issue with a hypothetical example:
I have a part clamped in my vise. The top surface is 0.50 above the vise jaws. All of my tool offsets were set relative to the top of the vise jaws. My understanding is that if I command Z to go to 1.0 the tool will stop 1.0 above the vise jaws and 0.5 above the work surface. Right? If I then command Z to feed to 0.2 the tool will then drill 0.3 into the part.
So I could program:
H17 Z1.0 M8
G99 G81 R0+0.2 Z0.365 F12. X0.75 Y-0.5 E1
Now, in the Fadal manual the sketches all show R0 being relative to "Z final depth". (Somewhere I also came across the statement that R0 is measured from Z final depth).
In the case above the tool would have drilled into the part 0.135 (0.5 - 0.365) and by Fadal's "definition" the tool would then have rapid retracted to 0.065 above the work surface [(0.2 + 0.365)-0.5] but still 0.435 below the I plane.
By all the definitions this seems logical but I get an error that either R or Z is wrong.
If I look at the cycle the G99 indicates "rapid retract to R level" so I decided to try G98 which means "rapid retract to initial level" but if I change to G98, assuming that any R0 is ignored, I still get the error.
Someone please tell me where the problem is.
because I'm about to go postal here!