Incremental retract in z-level cutting

[Kurt]

Hmmm, well here goes:

During rest milling, i would like the cutter to do only climb milling i.e one way. As a result, the cutter takes a cut at a particular z level and then comes up to a retract level which is absolute and above the z zero.

This results into a lot of air-cutting. I could set my retract at an incremental level, but it proves to be risky, particularly when there are some islands in the job, because my machine controller does not interpolate in rapid mode.

 

Is there any way, by which i can reduce the air-cutting without harming the workpiece ? Is it possible to convert those rapid moves to feed moves ? In such cases a G1 move would be much safer than a G0 move, when the cutter is moving inside the job.

 

Kurt.

[Bill]

The absolute z retract is by far the safest way. That will only rapid up from where the cutter previously was so if it was going to crash it would've been too late. I think there is a setting on the parameters page to "check motion for gouge". Now I don't know if all of the bugs are worked out so I usually don't use it in the incremental z.

What I do, however, is set my feed plane to the closest incremental z as possible and increase all of my feed rates that apply to rapid and retract. This does speed up the air time a bit. That restmill is the cats xxxx, though. Especially after a surface rough contour. Processing is a little slow but it sure is nice to be able to go from a 1 inch ball right into a 3/8 ball and not worry about your cutter slamming into heavy stock.