This is a general question about making quicker work of doing holes, lets say dowel pin holes in a mold, using a slot drill for drilling the hole and milling a counterbore, or simply enlarging the hole.

Just about all other canned autoroutines on my Shadow controller I could live without, but I really like the spiral type circle clean function, called a G27. This controller also has other things that it will do, such as rectangular pockets and facing routines, but I've dropped the usage of those long ago, because it is easier to do in CADcam than to make up the pocket out of one's head.

Anyways, the spiral circle clean G27 function just goes beautifully hand in hand with any of the drill cycles. Peck your way down and then counterbore the hole at a selected depth. I am not knocking Onecnc. I think provision for this type of process is extremely rare in CADCAM software.

Does anyone else use autoroutines like this? Note, this is not a cycle, and cannot easily be set up as a cycle, because it needs to be called every time it is desired: it is not modal.

Now I haven't learned to use Onecnc's hole making routines all that much and maybe I could dispense with this yearning, if someone wants to clue me in. It just seems that it is cumbersome to drill and counterbore a hole "the solid machining way" because it is difficult to combine a peck drilling motion, followed immediately by a counterbore procedure.

As a matter of fact, it is quite easy to "subtract" a hole from a solid, counterbore and all. But it seems difficult after that to gain control of just the operations required to do the counterbored hole.

So what do you do?