I'm sure it's a test piece.

Yeah, like he wants the first quarter inch of a 1.6" long cylinder to be .2070 +0 / -.0005, and the rest to be .2070 +0 / -.0015. I first suggested he draw it all at the mean, but he doesn't want a step at the transition between the zones. Not that you'd really notice the .0005" step.

How much did that cost?

My engineer coworker is designing a part which includes a long, cylindrical feature. Down the road this will be a lathe part to be jobbed out, but for prototypes I'll be milling it. He wants a single sided tolerance, with the same maximum diameter the full length of the part, but only needs the minimum diameter to be tight for a shot span at one end; it can get looser for the rest. He wants no visible transition between the two zones. I abhor single sided tolerances, and want everything modeled at the midppoint of the tolerance zones. I suggested as a compromise that he should model the whole feature at the diameter of the midpoint of the tighter tolerance zone. Is that how you would want it? Thanks

Do the indexable ones have a fine adjust for insert position?

I do this every single time. It's such a habit I thought it wouldn't need mentioning, sorry. It's also necessary if you want to open with a stock aware operation in your second setup.

I use "Top" for the stock models for my first setup. Then if I'm going to move / refixture the part, I'll create a new plane called "Stock flip op 2" or somesuch as here:

I recommend the book "Secrets of 5-Axis Machining" by Karlo Apro, in which this is explained.

I'm running an i7-6700K 4 core 8 thread overclocked to 4.5GHz, with 64GB RAM and a Quadro M4000. This system is four years old, so it's getting close to time to replace it. A lot of people would have replaced it already, but it's still meeting my needs pretty well and CPU advances have been slow lately (but are picking up again). If you tell us exactly what CPU and video card you have we can tell you how old they are and how much performance boost you would get by updating.

Thanks, learned something.

Any chance of getting better material for the next run?

EDM...? There are carbide taps available, don't know if they're any good: https://www.allenbenjamin.com/products/carbide-taps How many holes do you need to do?

Must have gone through cutters like popcorn. Either that or they weren't holding very tight tolerances. I'll wear comp in a couple tenths increments up to a thou or two before replacing a cutter; in many cases that would have been ten new cutters, and all the wasted time that entails.

FR-4?

What you're looking for is "remachining". It's an option in Contour.