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Need help w/ Multiaxis path selection


nperry
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Trying to figure out the best way to do this one - the floors I've got down with a 5X flow, and it looks nice. I'm trying to figure out how to do the walls as cleanly as possible. You can see that the outer track has a start and end point, with a 180 degree turn in the center. You can also see that there's variation on the walls, extreme on the ends, but also more moderate variation on the angle all the way around the track. There's some chunks of solid in there that also are not very clean...I'm unsure how well it's going to come out with those little sections where the flow is different. 

Going to run this part on a UMC750 and I'm programming with 2021. 

HOUSING1.png

HOUSING2.png

HOUSING3.png

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45 minutes ago, JParis said:

I think my 1st attempt at this, because of those very walls and they are not looking a great drive, would be a 5 axis curve using the floor as a "Normal To" surface

5X Curve yields me something that almost wants to think about being usable. It follows decent but gets jumpy around those choppy surface areas. The geometry is garbage too - I had to draw a bunch of nonsensical lines to get everything to connect, so I'm sure that's not helping. 

In my minds eye it makes sense that if the geometry/solid were unrolled it would be really easy to take a ball endmill and lay down a really, really clean waterline path on it. I'm just struggling to make that come to life. Is 5X Curve capable of that? I've only ever used it on straight walls. Here's a close up of what the majority of the walls look like...

housing4.png

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5 hours ago, cncappsjames said:

Those walls' CAD looks problematic. I don't see how smooth motion is even going to be possible. You're going to have to make some decisions... 

Hah, I was thinking the opposite, that those bumps and such are features that you wanted to hit!  E.g., when you got to them, "spin" around the top point to create the "cone" bump.

If not, use Swarf Milling, and set the collision control to allow gouges within your allowed range, that should smooth those out for you.

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On 7/30/2022 at 11:16 PM, Aaron Eberhard said:

Have you tried swarf milling?  If that doesn't work, you can try using Pocketing > Wall Finish. 

17 hours ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

Hah, I was thinking the opposite, that those bumps and such are features that you wanted to hit!  E.g., when you got to them, "spin" around the top point to create the "cone" bump.

If not, use Swarf Milling, and set the collision control to allow gouges within your allowed range, that should smooth those out for you.

That was the first path I put to it and I kept getting an error along the lines about how it couldn't "create a natural curve". I noticed the gouge control you're talking about though, I'll go back in and play with that  a bit. The track is a cast feature so I've got a lot of leeway as far as the machined surfaces in there.

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1 hour ago, nperry said:

That was the first path I put to it and I kept getting an error along the lines about how it couldn't "create a natural curve". I noticed the gouge control you're talking about though, I'll go back in and play with that  a bit. The track is a cast feature so I've got a lot of leeway as far as the machined surfaces in there.

Error is "Cannot build native curve." on swarf toolpath.

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That is nasty any way you look at it. Whoever modeled that doesn't understand the first thing about manufacturing. That will take some work and don't think swarf will be you friend here. I think you are going to have to surface machine those walls with a 4mm ball endmill since the root radius is 2mm. The floors with a bull endmill with a 2mm radius, but at each V raise with the sharp corners someone would be getting a 2mm radius in the bottom corners.

You can swarf large sections, but the whole thing not going to happen. Swarf will not handle that.

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6 minutes ago, crazy^millman said:

That is nasty any way you look at it. Whoever modeled that doesn't understand the first thing about manufacturing. That will take some work and don't think swarf will be you friend here. I think you are going to have to surface machine those walls with a 4mm ball endmill since the root radius is 2mm. The floors with a bull endmill with a 2mm radius, but at each V raise with the sharp corners someone would be getting a 2mm radius in the bottom corners.

You can swarf large sections, but the whole thing not going to happen. Swarf will not handle that.

OOOoffffff, yeah...  For sure...  I rescind the swarf recommendation.  That's not a surface you can (physically) swarf.  there's undercuts and twists around all of those bumps and the edges.  From the original pictures, I thought it was a straight wall with a bump popping out, but that's not the case at all.

I'd use a unified set to either Morph or Guide, and mill between the top and bottom.

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46 minutes ago, crazy^millman said:

That is nasty any way you look at it. Whoever modeled that doesn't understand the first thing about manufacturing. That will take some work and don't think swarf will be you friend here. I think you are going to have to surface machine those walls with a 4mm ball endmill since the root radius is 2mm. The floors with a bull endmill with a 2mm radius, but at each V raise with the sharp corners someone would be getting a 2mm radius in the bottom corners.

You can swarf large sections, but the whole thing not going to happen. Swarf will not handle that.

35 minutes ago, JParis said:

I fear Ron is right...that is some ugly a$$ geometry...

34 minutes ago, Aaron Eberhard said:

OOOoffffff, yeah...  For sure...  I rescind the swarf recommendation.  That's not a surface you can (physically) swarf.  there's undercuts and twists around all of those bumps and the edges.  From the original pictures, I thought it was a straight wall with a bump popping out, but that's not the case at all.

I'd use a unified set to either Morph or Guide, and mill between the top and bottom.

That's what I was afraid of. I might bring it into a newer version and try unified, but I'm not going to be dedicating a lot more time to playing around. I'll likely end up going with Ron's suggestion and surfacing everything on.

Thanks for the help, fellas.

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The biggest question I 'might" look to answer....does the model the engineer created, truly confer the design intent or was there a hope that the machines would give them what they want...

The biggest reason I would ask is simply how bad that geometry is....it makes me think someone just didn't know how to get what they really wanted out of the software and into the model.

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8 minutes ago, JParis said:

The biggest question I 'might" look to answer....does the model the engineer created, truly confer the design intent or was there a hope that the machines would give them what they want...

The biggest reason I would ask is simply how bad that geometry is....it makes me think someone just didn't know how to get what they really wanted out of the software and into the model.

If they come in to check on the status of the project I might try to broach the subject. It's cast prototype though...I'm unsure how much thought or care goes into some of these details. 

We've got a bunch of exceptions for the interior features of the part, too. Granted, we can tip to make a lot of it work but you're basically looking at having to run a .250 ball EM with  ~13" of stickout to make the interior of the part the way it was designed. Luckily we got clearance for .250 rads all the way around. 

Either way though, you guys know how it is, it's just so much more difficult to make clean paths off of geometry that's no good or nonexistent. 

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1 minute ago, nperry said:

it's just so much more difficult to make clean paths off of geometry that's no good or nonexistent.

That my friend is the cold, hard truth....either they give us good geometry, provide us the info to be able to create good geometry or we spend time programming it, trying to get a good path on shoddy information...that may or may not be the end reuslt that's desired.

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3 hours ago, nperry said:

That's what I was afraid of. I might bring it into a newer version and try unified, but I'm not going to be dedicating a lot more time to playing around. I'll likely end up going with Ron's suggestion and surfacing everything on.

Thanks for the help, fellas.

I put this on in less than 5 minutes, but I have a LITTLE BIT of seat time on Unified :)    If you're still on 2021 or 2020, you can use Morph set to Curves for the same effect.  if you get weird/inconsistent gaps, under advanced parameters set it to "exact."

I just chained the bottom of the fillet and the top of the wall (under the undercut) w/ a 6° tapered 6MM ball mill:

Tool axis control is set to rotate around the Z, but keep the tool 87° off of the surface normal so it will sort of swarf, but then I turned on collision control to have it automatically tilt if it'll gouge, so it's not really "tied" to the surface if it has to jiggle to get around those weird bumps.

It would be equally easy (but more time consuming for selection) to have done the whole thing, but I wanted to keep the file size down and get you going.

Feel free to reach out if you need more help!

1736119534_10333228_A_1-INNERMIDDLEHOUSING_ROUGH_STEP.zip

Toolpath.png

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