What kind of machine and material are you playing with? Colin stole my thunder with a small feed mill, but for things like this if it's a tough material, I'd drop a drill hole in to start and would try full slot with a feed mill. As silly as they are, Gorilla Mills makes some nice solid carbide feed mills like Colin referenced, and I've used them in quite tough material like Hiperco 50A with a lot of success.

There's a few different strategies I can think of, depending on how you're fixturing it up... Can you post a file with some (basic) ideas on how you're going to be holding it/what machine you've got available?

I'm pretty sure I started turning that off for my Centroid customers by default when I used to over-write their settings & toolbars back in X or X2... So yeah, going on 20 years for me

Same boat, that's an instant-off for me and one of the first things I teach :)

Oh yeah, I got bit by that one a few times in the early days. Good times, good times...

Hah, that was my same thought.. I was trying to remember the last time I used Surface Rough Pocket, but came up empty... Maybe X2 timeframe?

I don't know, sorry. Give it a try

@mp5navy77 - If you're in an old toolpath like that, you can't edit the holder directly, you have to right click on the tool and choose "Edit Projection."

To go one step further, if you can standardize on certain tools (I.e., I'm always going to have a 1/2" 3FL .03R Endmill with a .625LOC and 2.5OAL in a ER32 3.0" Holder) in your machine, then you can set up a operations library. I know that I can cut aluminum at a .625 DOC w/ .19" Step @ 98.5/7100RPM in Dynamic/Opti. Every time. Import that operation, it'll come with the tool in holder, correct feeds, speeds, depths, etc. All I have to do is select geometry and control top of stock/depths. I've made that toolpath in 20 seconds and I know that it'll work great, winner every time. The less things I have to touch, the less chance there is to screw something up!

That was programmed as an OpenMind (HyperMill) demo. You'd probably have to reach out to them to see if they would share the model. All of the stuff like that from Mastercam is available on the "Tech Exchange" on mastercam.com, under Community.

The issue if you want that to tilt away after flank milling the cylinder is that there's not a "natural" tool axis control that would it put it near the cylinder. If you point it at the large drive surface, then it would be tilting away from the "ear" when it gets to the fillet. If you force it towards the "ear", then it wouldn't be normal to the cylinder. You'd have to really twist its arm, and the easiest way is probably lines, possibly a reference surface that's bent the way you want the tool axis control to go. Not worth it, in either case. If you wanted this pattern to morph out to a rectangle, then simply draw the rectangle and add it as a second guide curve. Turn off "determined by number of cuts," and switch it back to "cut full." I only set that because otherwise it would have echoed out across the entire large cylinder since I only had one. If you have two and use Guide mode, it'll "trim" the toolpath to stay between those two.

Ah, yeah, if that's the requirement, that's a bit trickier for sure. Maybe you could use use Tilt Relative to reference surface, but I'd probably just try to do it with Lines...

You're welcome That's how it goes for everyone, I promise As a rule, always start with the cut pattern. Don't change anything else until you get a pattern that you're happy with. Then and only then move on to other things. You'll never fix a cut pattern problem with Tool Axis Control and so on.

Yeah, you have a whole lotta things checked and unchecked, settings changed, etc.. You're definitely making it hard on yourself I deleted your unified and started fresh (I could have also reset to defaults) to make sure that nothing odd was changed, like containment, limits, etc. Then, all you need to do is set up the Cut Parameters like this: Change your tool Axis Control page to "Fixed Angle To Axis" and choose the Z. That'll keep the tool vertical. Notice that I deleted all the other stuff other than the one solid you were wanting to machine. No wireframe chains, no surfaces, etc. Keep it simple Simple_Joint_5ax - simplified.zip Oh, to answer the original question, of where you went off the rails, I noticed a few things. In no particular order: * You had margins set to add a tool radius, which meant you'll never get the tool to center of the fillet * Tool axis control was set to rotate around Z, but only allowed to have between 2 and 10 degrees of tilt. This told it to follow your drive surface as long as you were rotating around that one axis, but it could never be vertical to the Z, it always had to be at least 2 degrees off. * Containment was set to manual and set to something? No idea what. * You were using two chains, and the inside chain was well inside the part and also well above the surface you wanted to cut. This could cause issues with starting accurately on the surface. There were a few others, but hope this helps

Yeup, that got rolled into that about 4 years ago now. Do yourself a favor and see if you can find any of the old rollout videos on Unified, and learn some of the new power available in the Guide, Automatic, etc. strategies. I have a YouTube channel with some videos on applying it to solve specific problems, mostly from this forum or facebook groups: https://www.youtube.com/@VectorMfg