[rcsimpson]

I have a few questions about the attached v25 BobCad file. I am engraving around a tube and the simulation turns out very crappy for me. My engraving features do a series of 1 thou passes to engrave to a total depth of 6-7 thousandths. If I just plunge pretty deep the simlulation looks ok. Maybe their round stock isn't perfectly round and it's just skipping on the surface, not sure.

The ordering of the engraving is suspect as well. It seems to start at a "willy nilly" location and skip through letters, etc. Weird.

When I import into Mach3 it leaves out some of the toolpath. Just random parts of letters missing. Not sure why. And my first attempt at engraving a piece of tubing left a line across the tubing where it should not have. The "clearance height" was calculated, but I don't think the command to raise to that height was obeyed for some reason.

Can somebody with v25 and Mach3 take this file and import it and see what I could have hosed up?

[BurrMan]

Here's a video of me fixing your file:

4th stock fix - YouTube

I'm not totally certain of what went wrong with it. It could be your stock creation method, or that custom "taig mini mill" that you have defined is not setup correctly, or a combination of both.

In the video, you can see me struggle with getting the stock re-oriented to wrap the part correctly. If I just open your file and go backwards to the stock wizard, it appears to go back to a "rectangular stock" as opposed to a cylindrical stock, with the 2 coords mixed between the stock and the wrapping group.

If this continues to happen with your files, we can re-visit this video "starting from scratch" without the "struggling part" to give you a clearer path to get a wrap.

Also, if your machine needs to be setup differently than how I just set this up (travels actually are opposite), then we need to review your machine definition and your creation process to have a good looksee.

Let me know if this helps.

[rcsimpson]

Thanks a bunch for the help. I think my first mistake was clicking on the "axis flip" button to get my stock over in the positive X quadrant.

I think I should instead just use a positive X value in the "enter origin" box to get that stock over there.

From there I'm not sure about the origin setup. In the BobCad examples it had me set the machine origin to the far right and ON TOP of the part. Then I'd Define Rotary Axis and put a negative value of 1/2 the diameter on Z I'm pretty sure.

[BurrMan]

From there I'm not sure about the origin setup. In the BobCad examples it had me set the machine origin to the far right and ON TOP of the part. Then I'd Define Rotary Axis and put a negative value of 1/2 the diameter on Z I'm pretty sure.

That part very well may have been ok and correct, I didnt check. It could have been the odd reversed thing...

For me, I just set it up with the center at zero, because thats how our 4th axis is set, so it keeps it simple.

I'll do some tests later to see if using the coords at the group level work in the sim......

[rcsimpson]

For the most part I have it working out ok except for the "magic" toolpaths that some of the BobCad fonts create. It will look ok on simulation, but shows up as something different when you import into Mach3.

Also, would the tool diameter have more to do with the clearance height or can I set it somewhere else? It seems to be dragging the tool just barely across the surface in a movement to the next character. I specified a very thin (0.005) tool just to simulate very fine text. Perhaps this is throwing off the clearance height calculation.