Strange toolpaths from mirrored surfaces.
I have a part I am making electrodes for that basically has a compound radius on the top surface. The edges are flat so the best way I could see to create the surface was using one quadrant of this surface and do a 4 edge surface. I did this and it worked great, then I did a <mirror<make copy< and then <mirror<makecopy again. This gives me all four quadrants of the surface. I stitch them all together and try to generate the toolpath. It will generate the toolpath, but it is basically garbage, it will gouge the surface in a strange random pattern that is mirrored in the opposite quadrant.
I tried doing boolean operations to join the surfaces instead of stitching, however I got pretty much the same results. After working on this for about 2 hours I figured out that it was from using the mirror function on the surfaces.
I then went back and created each quadrant of the surface from the original geometry and I got a surface that generated a nice smooth even toolpath with no gouges.
Has anyone else had problems like this? Are there rules for how I can manipulate surfaces and still get clean results?
I also found out that hard way not to try and mirror toolpaths, I get code with retracts after each line segment cut.
Jim