Surface finish leftover

[TERRYH]

When running a surface finish leftover program to pick smaller corners, what kind of overlap are others using? on our larger billets for headliners we finish them with a 1" ball mill and run a surface finish leftover we run a 1/2" ball for our settings we put 1" dia 1/2" rad. and .04 over lap and sometimes its almost like the 1/2" tool is not going over the 1" enough and leaves a cusp. and it seems worse the steeper the surface is. Is there another setting to control this or do we just need to open up the overlap more?

[betts]

I haven't used this much lately, but in the past I always had to either say my 1" cutter was 1-1/8" or use a larger overlap because I saw the same results you are seeing.

[Pitka_Guru]

+1 for what Betts said. We always said our previous tool was larger than it actually was.  I don't use this toolpath anymore as we have the high speed pencil program which offers more control and a nicer toolpath.

 

My understanding of the new high speed pencil is that it looks for surface intersections, not the radius of the fillet to generate the toolpath. This is much more powerful in terms of what you can do with a pencil program.

 

You can use it like a leftover by defining a previous tool diameter and letting it find your leftover area. Or, you can do single pass or multiple pass pencil style toolpaths. You can even do and unlimited stepover toolpath where it finish all the areas you have selected, not just the intersections. 

 

HTH

[Reko]

Personally, I never use Surface/Finish/Leftover anymore.

 

Several of the new High Speed toolpaths have a "Trim to Stock" option... it only finishes what is left over on the "Stock Model" that I create based on the finish operations already completed.

[TERRYH]

We only use the SFL because we cannot get our company to train us on any of the new stuff and it is all we know, and our CNC supervisor does not like for us to experiment, because we usually do not ever have the time, and cannot afford any mistakes.