My THM Problem (fixed it)

[LucasGC]

Hi friends.

I finally figured out the cause of the jittery motions I've been seeing on my machine and I feel so so so dumb for not fixing it earlier. I wasted so so so much time. so so so awful.

I had my tangency factor set too high. I remember seeing a recommendation to use it at somewhere between 5 and 10, so I had defaulted mine to 8 and I figured I would just be able to make a toolpath that would work with this value. 

I did ask Thermwood "is there a drawback to using max tangency other than tolerance deviation?"

and got the response "there is no other drawback to having a high tangency besides the deviation.  What you are seeing in your videos most likely is the control Starving for motion because your segments are too small."

This led me to believe that the higher tangency value I had, the smoother my toolpath would be. 

So that's a little frustrating. Oh well. Programming with my tangency now set to 1 seems to be working just fine. Every once in a while I will see it make a strange step but MUCH less frequently and MUCH less drastic. There is no option to turn off the tangency factor, deleting the code still defaults it to 1. The smallest value you can go to is .1 but there is no way of knowing what this value actually means since the equation is proprietary so I think i will just stick to default 1.

I also think there is a problem in Mcam between metric and standard processing of high-speed toolpaths. I've had two operations, a 3d hybrid and a 3d pocket high speed strategy, that I've made on the same part in both metric and standard files, and tried to make them as equal as possible (same surfaces, boundaries, tolerances) and kept coming up with more total moves in my metric operation than in my standard. I've brought this up to mcam support but since I've switched to programming in standard and have not pressed them further, I don't think they pursued it.

[crazy^millman]

Excellent work and part of our job is to do what you just did here.