Toolpath for Decent 3D Machining Finish?

[DrunkenPanda]

I've attached the .MCX so you can see what I'm dealing with. I'm trying to get a decent machined finish on this part, but I don't have all that much 3D machining experience, and my machine can only hold ~600kb. If I had my way, I'd adjust the tolerance to .0005 3D contour finish and let it rip, but that would result in a 10MB file for just the finishing pass... I currently have it split up into contour/3d rough, 3d finish, and holes/cbore separated posts... I've tried constant scallop, parallel, and contour with liberal tolerances to keep the file size in the <600kb range, but all come out gauged in several places...

 

Will it be necessary to drip feed to get a decent finish? Did I miss the boat on some setting somewhere?

 

If drip feed is in fact necessary, does anyone have any suggestions for drip feeding software that's relatively easy to setup? I've got a deadline of next week on 4 of these parts, and need to get it setup and working over the weekend if this is the case...

 

I'm running a Haas VF2 and Mastercam X4 if that matters...

 

Thanks in advance...

RIGHT SIDE CUT BLOCK EXPERIMENTAL.MCX

[DrunkenPanda]

Nevermind, figured it out... moved over to the VF6 with USB and ran it with FNC... 

[mctaylor]

If you run into this again and have to use VF2 and drip feed, try using CIMCO EDITOR we use it all the time and it works fine.  We have 2 HBM with FANUC Series 16m that have small capacity.

 

Good luck!!

[The Cathedral]

Maybe I'm saying something obvious that you already know; but when we have to run huge files on our older 16i Fanucs, I'll load the code on a pccard and run it as a subprogram. We use a compact flash card that can hold several gb, and a cf to pc adapter. I'm not sure if your Haas, or any Haas, has a pc card input though. 

[PeterM]

I've used the 3-1/2 drive to drip feed on a Haas. It's only 1.44 Mb but that's a lot bigger than 600Kb.

[The Chipmaker]

   DrunkenPanda, 

 How did you make out with your part?

[DrunkenPanda]

Came out fantastic... machined it with 3D contour with some tweaked settings and finished the flats with 3D parallel... there's a couple places on it that we'll polish, but nothing that the customer would be unhappy with... and it was mostly due to the forman shutting down the machine last night before it was done, despite my telling him not to haha...

 

Note to anyone that cares... loosening tolerances to bring down file size on 3D parts gouges the part and creates false geometry... I ordered a 25-pin > RS232 and RS232 > USB cable so I can run the rest on the VF2 after the weekend... got the run time down to about 6 hours @ 150 IPM, which I'm fairly happy with without having access to a high-speed console...