Surface Rough Contour Depth Cuts?

[Mavortius]

I'm working on a milling program for a vertical mill. I want to surface rough an open cavity and I want to mill down to the surface with depth cuts. But the Surface Rough Contour Toolpath doesn't allow for stock recognition and I don't know how else to get it to work. Sure, I'm milling plastic, but I don't want to go straight down to full depth. With an open cavity, how do I get it to cut from the outside in like I can with Multipasses?

[neurosis]

Do you have an image or screen shot of what you are trying to do?

[Thee Awbade™]

Does that toolpath have a depth cut option? Or just a "Top of stock/Depth" Option? If so, you can manually edit the numbers to where you want it to start cutting. Ex. (Depth = 0 Surface., Top of stock = 3.) Set Depth cuts to .5 and blam you've got 6 depth cuts.

 

I could be completely wrong though since I'm still pretty new at this, but I would imagine that would work.

[Marshal]

Under "rough contour paramaters", change your maximum stepdown to whatever depth of cut you want.

[Mavortius]

I gave up and made a series of 2D contour toolpaths. The Surface Rough Toolpath doesn't let you specify the stock height, and the "depth cut" parameter only refers to how far down the surface it will increment in Z. This isn't a very effective roughing toolpath if you can't use depth cuts before reaching the surface. I'm not asking for much.

[Ocean Lacky™]

Surface Rest Rough would be one way to do it