Excessive Retracts in Restmill

[dgriffiths]

I am milling multiple pockets with a .5 Endmill and then using Rough/Restmill with a 1/4" ballmill to remove excess material before finishing. The resulting toolpath has excessive retracts in every pocket. I have had this issue a few times now and have not figured out what I am doing wrong. Any help will be great. I will try to copy the file to the FTP. If it works it will be called restmill_lifts.mc9

[Travis_Buchanan]

Is there a gap settings in this tool path? If so increase your distance or perecentage.

[Lumpnut]

Try pocket/remachining instead of Rough/Restmill if you can?

[Mike Whitten CAD/CAM Contractors]

Are you using mur0904?

[Fig sign]

Do you have direction of open contoures -zigzag ?

[dgriffiths]

Thanks for the quick responses. To answer your questions I did change the gap setting and it helped reduce some of the retracts. I was not running MuR0904 but I am installing it right now. The open contours is set to zigzag. I do not think I can use Pocket/Remachining because I am working with surfaces.

[Mike Whitten CAD/CAM Contractors]

Be carefull with mur0904. I had to uninstall because of bug #6978 This bug add lots of extraneous retracts with surface>rough>pock when the tp origin is shifted in "Z" from system origin. So..if this is not the case, you may be OK with mur0904? I was just thinking that this could be a related issue.

 

Thanks,

Mike

[P_Scott]

dgriffiths,

 

Also check on the third page of the Restmill toolpath. There is a switch near the bottom left of that page for optimizing the toolpath. This may help reduce retracts. HTH

[Lumpnut]

quote:

---

I do not think I can use Pocket/Remachining because I am working with surfaces.

---

Hows about finish / leftover ???

 

As far as I know (not much ) anytime you use a surface / rough toolpath you will typically have alot of retratcs cuz of the max stepdown setting. Gap settings and optimizing may reduce it some but after the tool finishes the path at the max stepdown depth it retratcs to whatever you have the retract plane set at.(?)

 

[TKDBB]

We DO NOT check the "Optimize" box when using Restmill. It has the nasty habit of trying to dive too deeply in Z, ignoring the stepdown setting.

[Fred @ Slate Industries]

I do not use Rest mill because of all the

added moves.I just get creative and make

some pocket boundries to clean the stock out. operation 1 "Clean up the walls and stay off the floor by .005"

Operation 2 "Nail the Z and stay off the wall by .005" It works......

[P_Scott]

TKDBB,

 

Are you on the Maintenance program for Mastercam? Are you using the latest parameters for surface toolpaths by activating them from the TPCFG.dll C-hook? There were several advances made to the surface toolpaths specifically for Maintenance users. I haven't seen what you describe in any recent use of the Restmill toolpath while optimizing toolpath.

 

If you have any specific issues, perhaps you could share the file with the rest of the forum by uploading it to the FTP site. I'd be happy to look it over. Any technical issues you've encountered should have already been discussed with your reseller, or been brought to the attention of other users in this forum.

 

Don't disqualify something that is supposed to work in the software unless you've pursued the issue to the extent of your abilities or with help from others and found that it still is not resolved. This could possibly be a "feature" in the software and CNC Software Inc. would like to know about it so they can address it and fix it, should it need fixing.

[dgriffiths]

I have had some time to mess with this a liitle more and I think I am making some headway. I will try the leftover operation today. It is one that I have never used before. I tried to access the ftp and I must be doing something wrong. When I click on the ftp link my browser stalls for a while then gives a message that says "This document contains no data." I am using Mozilla as a browser.