get rid of flowine straight z moves

[Sbarner]

Greetings all,

 

I'll start off by saying that the part in question is on the FTP site. In the X3 files, the Z2G is called "Anode Panel". The operation in question is op 17...surface finish flowline.

 

I use surfacing rarely, and when I do there is generally a few of these straight Z moves, but not many. I guess the time has come to ask how to get rid of them. There are about a billion in this toolpath. I hope you can understand what I want to do here. It's a simple 1/8" radius that I want to surface. I want to touch the 1/16" ball endmill at one point, and simply make spiral moves until it gets to the bottom of the surface...easy enough?

 

Check out operation 15 in the same program. This is more what I want for operation 17 as far as straight plunge moves go. Perhaps using flowine for this is wrong. Is there a better toolpath to do what I want to do?

[Sbarner]

Well, I think I solved my own problem. I changed the stock to leave on the drive to -.0001. This took care of the z plunge moves on the top of the surface. I took the check surface off the bottom of the surface, and all is well again.

[Chris Rizzo]

I'm on X4 so I can't send it back to you, but I believe this is the droid you are looking for.

 

 

 

For a toolpath use surface >finish > blend. Drive geo is the two inner surfs, check surf is the outer flat one. You also have to select 2 wireframe entities as well, the toolpath "looks" between the wire and "blends". I just drew a random circle (pink) for one chain, and then selected the point at the center as the other chain. Re order the circle and point in geo selection to get it to cut inside to out.

 

hth

 

 

oh, if you really want to use flowline (blend is better though), set your gap settings something like this. You needed to crank up the gap size, that's all.

 

[dforsythe]

open the tool path. click finish flowline options. click gap settings, set distance to 1.0.

 

click on optimize cut order and regen.

[Jason B.]

In my humble opinion......

 

Operation 15 should be a RULED wireframe toolpath and 17 should be a 2D SWEPT. All your worries would go away at that point.

 

As for keeping the surfacing toolpaths, The other guys are correct with increasing your gap size but just watch closely for gouges when you do that.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

You have WAY more control over Flowline though. You can control cusp height over the whoe surface instead of having just a generic stepover. I like Ruled and swept in certain sitiuations but I think in this case, my preferance would be flowline. Also, using direction you can lead in and lead out.

 

JM2C