Post for thermwood router not quite right

[terry5357]

I was at a company today that has a Thermwood router (5 axis) and somtimes the 5 axis toolpaths do some crazy things (from what they tell me) it seems the sometimes the 5 axis toolpath will be rotated or copied and rotated 180. They were told by THermwood to rotate the "B" axis 180. They did that and everything was fine. Here's the fly in the ointment. The guy doing the programming is really their engineer and was formerly a programmer many years ago. Having just walked in and asked about this problem, is it the post or MCX, I told them that without actually sitting down and toolpathing some geometry I could venture a guess. Personally I am wondering if the "Engineer" set up the 5 axis toolpath parameters correctly.

MCX came with the machine as a package, is the post from thermwood a good post or is it just a starting place. Anyone having Thermwoods please let me know. Incidentally I was interviewing there.

[crazy^millman]

Well for 180 things I really think that might come down to a swtich in the post. I think Thermwood is using a post from a company in Canada that is not In-House and is a really good dialed in post. The biggest thing I found on the Thermwood is thinking about the wind and unwinds when making and doing the toolpaths. Is this person starting a toolpath where the head is starting near the axis limits then making the toolpath stay within those limits to keep the head from having crazy unwinds. I picked up a trick from G-code where you use Curve 5 axis to control vectors and keep the head going where and how you want it. I would have to have the post, operations in a Mastercam program and the machine in front of me then and only then could I tell you for sure what is going on.

 

HTH

[MATT Q]

If that is the post that I was using at TPI I would say the programmer isn't starting the toolpaths in the right place to begin with like what Ron is saying. That post is really dialed in and works great if you know what you are doing.

just my $.02

[MATT Q]

If that is the post that I was using at TPI I would say the programmer isn't starting the toolpaths in the right place to begin with like what Ron is saying. That post is really dialed in and works great if you know what you are doing.

just my $.02

[terry5357]

Okay this is what I saw, 1st off the guy was conventional milling (IMO wrong). It was a situation where you could have just as easinly tilted the contrustion plane and just chained a contour. I am sure, now that I thingk about it he was not chaining rails (which would have been another more simpl proceedure. And finally, they had mentioned that the machine was having to do unwinds. How much rotation does a THermwood normally have?

[MATT Q]

C axis has 360 degrees travel but sometimes you can squeeze 1 or 2 more. If that post is the one I'm thinking of it is locked up tight. Curve 5 paths rock on thermoformed parts.