bosses

[MattW]

I am just a beginner at Mastercam, so bear with me. I have a part with 384 bosses on it, brought in from Solidworks. the bosses are .080 dia and there is .078 between them at their closest. The best I have been able to do is to offset a line from the outer edges of the part and then pocket, selecting all 384 bosses individually. There has to be a better way, and I haven't fumbled my way there yet. Also, the toolpaths generated by this method spend a lot of time cutting nothing. Any suggestions?

 

MattW

[The Iron Chef]

Hello MattW

Welcome to the Forum

 

Play with ALL the options in Pocketing. Step over, and the different "cutting methods" try turning on "miminmize tool burial" under the Rough/Finish pocket parameter. Use the biggest tool that you can fit. 5/32 dia might fit if you can go to the low side of the diameter tolerences.

use an incremental clearance value (less time under feedrate, more time under rapid!

as far as picking all that geomtry; you may be able to window all the bosses and hope that the tool offsets correctly on all of them.

 

HTH

-Keith from home

[Fig sign]

Welcome to the board .

Put your part on ftp and may be I can help you (later )

 

HTH

[Dragonz]

pocket one ppcket and use transform to copy it to the rest

[Jammer™]

MattW, You should be able to eliminate the "air cutting" by changing some parameters. But, like Iskander says, post it on the FTP site and I am sure you will get the help your looking for.

Welcome to the forum!

[Dragonz]

to eleminate air cutting u should have to select the top of the stock... and the actually z zero and the rapid above the stock only .1

 

play with the top of the stock and feed plane and depth..

[Fred @ Slate Industries]

Surface rough pocket, leave a couple of grand for cleaning them up.

Then contour a row of bosses

climb milling, and make sure your bosses contour is a true arc not a spline or it will look like a stop sign not a clean circle.

(Watch your lead in out so you dont gouge )

You might have to tweak your start point in

the chain manager, I would use dynamic mode)

then transform your toolpath X amount of times

each row(If there in a row) ?

 

If you can't find these things just ask.

[MattW]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I can't seem to access the FTP site, and the problem isn't immediately obvious to me. I could email it to someone that could post it.

 

The bosses are in a 16 x 24 array, and part of the problem I am having is after making a tweak, it takes something like 15-20 minutes to regenerate the tooling paths. I need to build a mini part to experiment with.

 

I feel fairly certain I am making this much harder than it needs to be.

 

MattW

Vertex Pharmaceuticals

[Fig sign]

E-mail it to Winnie(dot)tehPooh(at)gmail(dot)com

Best regards

[Fred @ Slate Industries]

Here is what I do.

If I know that the regen is going to be time consuming and I am not sure if it will even do what I want it to do, I will take it all in one pass or in surfacing in passes of .01+ or something.

Then it regens in a snap and if it cut all

the areas I wanted cut nicely I will then

Set it for depth cuts of .002 etc.

 

Tony Sprinting for the 200 Mark

[Chris Rizzo]

I like that idea Tony.

 

Matt, What level are you running? Specifically if you don't have mill level 3, surface toolpaths won't work for you- also if your part is just wireframe and not surfaces. IMO it seems like 2-d pocketing routines have the most variables and settings to deal with. hang in there. cmrizzo (aT) Gmail (you know the rest) ;D

[Fig sign]

Matt ,check your e-mail.

I will explain later :busy:

[medaq]

quote:

---

The best I have been able to do is to offset a line from the outer edges of the part and then pocket, selecting all 384 bosses individually.

---

Toolpaths-pocket-window-

 

Window the entire area of your extent of the pocket, and all the bosses inside. Basicaly get everything.

 

Then click endpoint after you highlight everything, click the top left corner of your pocket. or where ever, I just have a habit of top left. and walla everything is grabbed for a pocket routine. Clicking 384 bosses is a little much

 

I always tell anyone I am training on mastercam to ask if he thinks there is a better way to do something in mcam. Since there usualy is a better way to do it

 

Jim

[Fig sign]

1000 to medaq

That`s actually what I did .

First of all I separated geometry ,copied all arcs of needed diameter to another level

With screen->chg. levels ->copy->mask set on arc with diameter :->input D and select the actual diameter .

Now I turn off all the levels except my level ,put model on Gview side and delete all the upper contours (I do not need them ) delete by window

After that I select all the geo for contour toolpath by window (in options you will find direction of chains ) .

After that I build arc for one element ,Xform->tranlate it as needed and made same style one more contour toolpath to remove islands from cuts and build points to show ,how to remove it fast other way :->by drilling with an end-mill.

This old styled ways are prefereble for this type of geo and much faster too .

Toolpath time is twice less and after "licking" can be even smaller .

I wasted 10 minutes of my holiday for this file .

That means I never selected nothing by hand ,all the time by window or by group result .

After learning some basics nothing can compare to mastercam in speed of programming .

 

 

Best regards

[Eeyore-nonhuman forum member]

~~~~~~~~~~~

Now I turn off all the levels except my level ,put model on Gview side and delete all the upper contours (I do not need them ) delete by window

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If he would see ,that every pin has two contours on different Z ,he may select all the arcs by window and the plane mask together ,no need to copy-delete .

But my friend teh Owl says he always prefer to separete geometry ,leaving original geometry as it is and copy geometry to another level to edit it .

 

ETHH

 

[ 12-12-2004, 02:35 AM: Message edited by: Eeyore-nonhuman forum member ]

[MattW]

OK, thanks all, I have some things to try. I have been making progress on this part, but there are going to be others like this (I can imagine an item with 1500+ bosses). I figured there had to be a better way than selecting them individually.

 

MattW

Vertex Pharmaceuticals