Custom tools & Surface contour...

[William Grizwald]

I've defined some custom tools to represent 3" dia shellmills using round button inserts. In the custom tool/diameter value I have 3.0. The tool is kellering a large angled slope. It seems to drive on the theoretical corner of a 90 deg mill which means the tool is not tangent (touching) the drive surface. I changed it to a standard bullnose e/m and it works fine as expected.

 

My question is then, can you drive a custom defined tool to its tangent cutting edge? We're considering an all custom tool approach for data management reasons.

 

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Bill

[Guest]

William,

 

If you define your tools at a diameter it "should" cut based on that geometry.

 

The greatest success I have had is setting them as undefined tools instead of using one of the pre-defined types,

[William Grizwald]

Reply to self...

 

To get the terminology correct: I created an "undefined" tool using a ref mcx file. I forgot to enter the tool radius into the field. That said, once entered the field goes back to zero once saved and recalled. Seems to work now so... onwards we go!

 

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Bill

[Roger Peterson]

Surface toolpaths do not support undefined tools.

[William Grizwald]

Roger you are correct it seems. While entering the radius field in the undefined tool generates the correct toolpath (at that moment). It then goes back to zero corner (and offsets the tool accordingly) if the operation is regenerated...

 

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Bill

[gcode]

quote:

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Surface toolpaths do not support undefined tools.

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Even though you have defined the tool with geometry, go into the tool description page

and enter the correct tool diameter and tool radius. Then you will get the correct output.

[jctjct]

I have had the best luck defining button shellmills as "Slot Mill" and then putting the diameter of the button for flute height, corner radius of 1/2 button diameter. However, toolpath generation takes a LOT longer than calling it a bull mill. The geometry of some of our parts requires the cutter to be able to cut slightly on the backside of the button, and bull mill does not give an accurate result in these areas.

[Roger Peterson]

While technically if you are drawing basically a bull endmill you can define it as a undefined tool and then on the toolpath parameters page enter the corner radius manually (it will not be brought in from the tool definition) it will calculate a toolpath correctly. But any other shape than a simple bullnose will NOT compensate correctly. If you have an odd shaped tool you are better off defining it as one of the predefined tool shapes that calculate correctly (flat, sphere, bull, tapered, etc...) and then using a custom profile for backplot and verify. When using a custom profile for verify it will remove material using the custom profile so you can do a stl compare and see if your odd shaped tool caused any problems. See the help file on how to define a tool shape to be used as a custom tool profile for a predefined tool shape.

 

 

HTH