You can use mulitple chains if you use the HST toolpaths. I use solids and multiple chains to just machine the section necessary. WARNING. Boundaries DO NOT contain entry and exit motion motionn on the "smoothed" HST's. Make sure and define all surfaces as drive surfaces and then contain it with a boudary. This way the code generator does not violate those surfaces with entry and exit motion.

I was going to go the one in Baltimore, but I may swing up to Horsham to get a little face to face time with some of you guys. I am really looking forward to it.

Shawn here is the link that I use for all of OSG's High Tech cutters as they call them. If you are going to get into hardmilling of tool steels I would reccomend Jabro through Tesco as the way to go. HTH OSG's Blizzard page

I bought them for the model shop next door after they were having some problems with their standard 3 flutes. They were trying to run 12k in their subspindles, (auxillary 40K nsk mounted to the side of the head) and it required more than the small motors wanted to deliver, so they were rubbing the material gauling ect. I bought these and proved them out over here in our Makino by monitoring spindle load and was very impressed by how little they required to run at that rpm and feed rate. They have been running them for about a year now and that is all they want to use. I will say that OSG has been SEVERLLY slow on delivery as of late.

The blizzard will help you with dry chip evacuation at that low rpm. Drop you feed down to match your rpm. Also watch running a bridgport style spindle at max rpm for more than a few minuets, because it will start getting hot and start growing on you.

Run coolant, clean it later. I use the blizzard endmill from OSG and it runs pretty good dry, but it you want to really push it you need coolant to help get the chips out. 1/4" Ø 3 flute I would run at .125 doc full width possible at 18300 rpm at 211 ipm. This equates to about a .004" chip load and these little buggers scream. Suface finish is surprisingly good with good holders. Tool life is fenomenal. HTH

If you are only cutting the grey a HST waterline would work great and give you very smooth results. I genreally use it down to about 30°'s after that I will run a raster, scallop, or pencil to clean up the shallower areas. Scallop does handle everything in one operation, I just don't like how it transistions movement sometimes. You get marks on your part that have to be polished out or they really stand out when you mold the part.

I program with the solids, because if you are picking surfaces and forget to define check surfaces it can and will loop right through your parts. Big key here is that containment boundary DOES NOT affect the lead in and out loops. Other than that I used the defualts unless I start running over 200ipm. You will need to increase the looping radius above these our your machines will really start slowing down during look ahead.

I hit function key 5 on my Space Pilot and it goes away whenever I want it to.

IF you use the high speed toolpaths you can use nested boudaries. I found this the other day, and oh boy does it work good. disclaimer, so far

I would say an unclean post is one where you have to manually edit in tool pick-up in a laser tool offsetter, or likewise for probing. I would also say that an unclean post is one where you have to manually call up sub programs or macros.

From my meager understanding of control software. The control doesn't actually cut the arc. It translates it into small chordal moves based off of the control software. Therefore when you program Chords or facets you save the control processing time. Not to mention surface finish improves over "filtered" toolpaths. Older controls couldn't deal with the large programs that this developes, nor could they process the data fast enough. The new controls fly through the barage of information and generate great toolpaths.

David, If you are running M250 the control with SGI3 allows the machine to deviate from programmed points by .0001 or less. If you go the M251 it allows the machine to be "less" accurate therefore the path runs faster. If you look up M250, M251, and M252 in the Makino Machine manual I believe it tells you what the settings are for each different m-code. And yes that control will fly on an unfiltered toolpath programmed with a .00004" absolute programming accuracy. If you take your programming accuarcy up to .0002" I have actually had the program run slower. I also program all linear movement on my mold surfaces. NO arcs, and this also runs faster. The program is hella big, but it flys through the control.

Amen! Mark. Had to learn that one from expierence.

It defualts to whatever you have you machine definition set-up to do. If you go into your machine definition and place you maximum feed and rapids in there it will pick these defualts up. HTH. And I don't know of any machine that will do that kind of feedrate. But I am sure there is answer forthcoming from Curly or Moe.

Hey Jeff is that how Michgan spends most of the game? Upside down.

+1 to dummy surfaces. I use boundardy but depending on what you select for boundary, or accidentally select boundary can cause a gouge. A very safe way to go is a flat boundary surface above your part that the cutter will not violate. This also causes the cutter to come up higher when you use the different retract values.

If you purchase the converter it does a wonderful job. I have only expirenced minor issues with the files not openeing on the first attempt. I usually reboot and this problem goes away. We bring in some very complex mold assemblies and everything looks great.

Kyle has one a little out of my skill set here fellows. I would do it in PRO, but that doesn't help him out with how to do it in MC. I beleive you can create a trajectory between the starting and ending geometry and sweep the cut along that geometry. I am just not familar enough with MC solids to complete it.

Are you trying to create the surface for the Ball endmill to cut or the toolpath. You can try to sweep the ball nose profile around your cut lines. Drop me a line and let me have a look.

That is exactly what I was talking about with the servo controls. The problem with the Makino is that it gives you a TAP setting and you have to play around with this a little to ge the hang of what it is actually doing to your part.

In the Makino you have you will expirence less belly with out of the box settings using the zinc coated wire on taller pieces. With that being said you can also tweek some of the control servo settings and get the same result. I then save those settings as custom cut codes in the control and call them the next time I need to cut a part of that thickness. I typically get less than .0002" per side belly with out of the box settings on parts less than 3 inches. I don't cut much taller than that so I can't give any advice on the thicker stuff. I have only seen the belly wizard perform in the showroom at Auburn Hills and I can say from the parts that they pulled out it worked great for straight parts. The cut seems to take longer due to the "magic" that they are performing. It all has to do with how the are cutting the part. Not overly complicated, but neat in the same sense. I hope my long windedness didn't bore you. Too much diet coke today and my fingers are buzzing.

You will get real nice transitions on this with the HST area clearance toolpath. BUT it is going to take a little while for the toolpath to generate. If you are looking to do this in production though I would look at pocketing with a larger cutter and then using contour ramp or leftover to clean out the corners.

The HST core rough is a very smooth toolpath on a High Speed Machine. I use it all the time because of the smoothness of transition motion and the fact that it tends to not bury your cutter. The area clearance is great because it starts in the center of the volume and works outwards in smooth tangential motion. Pockets will always work, but you are often limited in tool transition between passes. THe gooves I would cut with a 2d ramp.

I would prefer to rough with a collet set-up to help mimize vibration translation into the spindle. I finish with shrink-fit due to run-out and finish.