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Surface Finish Flowline


Thoob
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Hi guys. is there a way to use finish flowline on an angle? I have a part that is on a 17 degree angle and I would like to use flowline to finish it however it seems flowline can only move at 0 or 90 degrees. Is there a way to make it move at 17 degrees kind of like a surface parrallel can be?

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Flowline uses the U/V curves of the original (not trimmed) surface to establish the cut direction. You only get parallel to U or parallel to V.

 

Try Surface Finish Blend. Create two chains of geometry along the edges of your surface. These will be your blend curves. Then toolpath like flowline, and add the 2 blend curves. SFB will do a smooth blend across the surface, using the 2 chains to establish the cut direction.

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Anytime. One other thing to be aware of with blend; you can blend from unequal chains. I do this quite often on triangular shaped surfaces (like a 3 edge fillet blend), where I blend from a chain to a point (when selecting your blend curves, toggle the chain selection mode to "point"). This gives some really nice results on oddly shaped surfaces.

 

You can also blend from a straight line to a curve. This works great when the surfaces edges aren't necessarily parallel.

 

Blend is also really powerful at cutting multiple surfaces that do not share the same U/V directions for the curves. Check out the '3D-PROJECT-BLEND' sample file (download the samples from Mastercam.com). This single Blend toolpath cuts across about 160 trimmed surfaces, while maintaining the blend chain direction. This toolpath would be impossible with a single Flowline toolpath, and would require dozens of Flowline toolpaths, many that would need to use Check Surfaces.

 

This is pretty much my go-to path for surface finishing across multiple tangent surfaces...

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