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I sure miss the DMS, way better than the Thermwood I'm stuck with now. Just to be fair the Therm is older and been rode hard without any major problems, you just have to work around it's lack of rigidity.
We ran the DMS 24/5 for 70k cycles without a hicup. Oh Yeah! like Colin said push for the continuous C axis. Another thing I would suggest is to budget in a rock solid post.
I have had a strange event machining a impeller. The vanes were extremely pointed for some reason. Using cut depths for light cuts for the thin points on top worked fine but the same toolpath totaly wiped out the vanes if I tried to avoid machining the top of the vane done by the previous operation. So I adjusted the cut depth above the part and no problem, just some redundant passes.
Not sure if that helps with your situation as this impeller had draft and was just using surface contour toolpath.
You could save your verify as stl, then reopen and put a silhouette boundary around it, if you were looking for a cross section as long as no other surfaces were in the way of the projected view. Also you could open the stl as lines and slice it.
Reko,
Metacuts gives good bang for the buck, just cutting wood/urethane patterns here but clean code is everything. Mostly to see the actual z extends +/- from programmed zero is a great benefit when cramming a part on a machine with limited clearance, I do a lot of layered machineing "stack and whack" using the same operations and just changing the depth limits. The graphics on Metacuts is not pretty but its rock solid.
I use Metacuts to edit the NC, especially if the part has a ton of surfaces which makes regen time crazy long. Place the part negative in z with a known max value positve in z and just keep editing/verify until it fits.
I have progammed both flamer and thermwood 5-axis routers, totaly different animals IMHO, I would prefer to reprogram from the cad file to get clean code.
Hey cnc,
I was handed a new DMS 5-axis router and know exactly what your feeling. Is your machine new? If it is the guy that set it up should have offered training for a day or two.
The router here uses a xxxxor control set up using TCP, which makes 5-axis programming/part trimming a snap. One thing to add to Colin's great advice is get that post rock solid working through your reseller. We purchased ours and the post guru helped me out alot. Once your post is right you can focus on programming.
I found a old V9 sample file of multi-axis trimming a bed liner. That one file got me up and going on my own and its been one @ell of ride! and this forum is the best.
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