>A wise move

[Gracjan aka Pullo]

A certain thing came to my attention yesterday (the solution). I have been plagued during the past 5 months with machining errors when using solids as base geometry for calculations. The same problem seems to be in 2017 and X9. What happened was that I had to resort to welding....

To make a long story short here is the recipe for evading these kind of errors and also there is an up side to it.

 

Set the parameter "Skip hidden face test for solid bodies" to "on" (tick active) in all the old school surface toolpaths under the "Advanced settings".

Turning this off may lead to faces not being used in toolpath calculations i.e material addtition , I had three of these

The upside is that for a mold half containing 1779 faces the calculation time fell from 41.04 seconds to 29.8 secs. 

 

I'll get back to this with examples , but for know I only offer the heads up.

Mcam 2018 seems to be corrected , or at least one of my examples calculated correctly with the option in question  on or off

 

Gracjan

[AMCNitro]

I would venture to say that most people dont use solids for programing.  I use the solids to create 2d geometry(sometimes I do use the solid, but for simple things like counter bores), and I convert the solid to surfaces.

[Gracjan aka Pullo]

I had noticed that the same part machined using surfaces was much faster to calculate , so I started using surfaces and also I had these issues with solids...

The part with 1779 faces takes 29.8 seconds  using surfaces, so the culprit doubling the time here is not solid to surf conversion as I had imagined , but the setting mentioned above. It's solids  over surfs  for me from now on.

 

Gracjan