Lee, Be carefull with tricordial cuts. Make shure to only take a small radial engagement like 2 to 3 percent at first to see how it cuts. Radial engagement is based on the percentage of the tool diameter. A .0025 step over on a .25 end mill would be 1 percent .025 stepover would be 10 percent and so on. You are going to have to play with the speeds and feed alot till you zero in on the right one unless you already have parameters on that tool. Cutting this way should take tons of time off of the job. Depth cuts still can be used if you want. Yes the sharp corner on a tool is the weekest link. You always want to avoid full radial engagement if posible. That is why a cutter squeaks in a corner because of 50 percent radial engagement. Always generate your corners! Look into bull nose endmill and you will never go back I promise. If you need a sharp corner in a pocket you can always chase it will a sharp cutter. Check out iscar chatter free line or seco's solid square end mills you will be glad you did. And no I dont work for any cutter company I am a mold maker and do alot of high speed milling.

I would say spend the time and drill a start hole first. That way you aviod ramping all together. I think ramping at 3 degrees will definitely reduce cutter life. Usually the angle ground on the bottom of and end mill is 2 deg. You could also try using a .25 em in the small slot and a .375 em on the large slot and tricordial side milling the pockets out and you will never touch the bottom of the cutters.

Here are some guildlines to go by. 1 Use a coated cutter. TiAlN is good to start with. 2 Side mill as much as possible. 3 Buy cutters with a radius or chamfer on the corner. Once the corner goes its all downhill from there. Its very common to find this on any new line of tool. 4 Dont ramp or helical mill with a sharp corner endmill if you do make shure you ramp at 1 degree or less. By doing so you prevent the center of the tool from cutting. 5 Call your local tool supplier and ask about the latest line of tooling. Then contact there support deptment on speeds and feeds. Dont guess at sfm because you can kill the life of the tool. You can find the best spm by experimenting if you have time. Coated tools generally have a higher sfm than the speeds you are using. Taking too little a chip load is just as bad as taking too much or removing it too fast or slow. 6 Understand that face milling with and endmill (ie taking the whole diameter or sloting) requires a different speed and feed than side milling. Read seco's article on radial engagement. Hope this helps. I would like to here other feedback as well.

First create curve on surface. By doing this it will allow you to make a containment boundry around the standing core. You will also have to make another boundry larger than the block so the path stays between the two contours and doesnt cut the standing core area. There is a tool containment setting in the cut parameters page in all the hst toolpaths, select the inside option then set the tool offet feature right below that to .020" or more to be safe. Hst toolpath does not support check surfaces. At least that is what shopware has told me.

In Machine group properties under tool settings you might have the box checked for "assign tool nubers sequentially". I think this sometimes has and effect if you are importing operations. I have mine deselected and i dont have any problems. Also my search tool library is deselected in the same page. Hope this helps

Once you start using solidworkd to create solid models I promise that you will never go back to mastercam. This is what happened to me. I now use solidworks to do all my solid modeling and use mastercam only for toolpaths. The thought of designing in mastercam makes me cringe. I would talk you boss into buying it and learning it yourself. Its not that mastercam can do the modeling its just soooo much easier in solidworks. The biggest hurtle you will have to jump is learing the associativity and relations of sketching. The solid modeling part is suprisingly similiar to mastercam. Good Luck

I think i can unbend it for you. I would like to try ant least. Especialy if it is not a sheet metal part.

Well then instead of making a new toolpath, maybe they should fix the pencil path. It does not work well or at all some times on those small radii. When you use a small cutter with negitive stock for overburn and there is a radius in the corner mastercam doesnt even spit out a toolpath overthickness or not.

I am machining electrodes and I am finshing concave .02 contoured radii with a .031 ball end mill. I am removing the leftover stock from the .062 ball endmill.

I hope for christmas that mastercam will develop a new high speed leftover toolpath. Now I know that there is a regular leftover path but if there is anyone out there who could agree that it leaves much to be desired. The regular path makes a very jagged toolpath especially at shallow angles. And I know that someone is going to reply that I should be using the new filtering, AND I HAVE!, with no success. I can program a leftover path at 60ipm and if I am lucky it will only get up to 15ipm because of all the directional changes. This wears the hell out of my tool as well as costs time.