Originally Posted by
CountryBoy19
I think the good thing for me is that I'm a full-time prototype/design engineer that spends 30+ hrs a week doing CAD work and my machine-shop at home gives me the machining background so it's very easy for me jump into something like Sprutcam and comprehend things with a little guidance. Not so easy to comprehend the g-code part so I struggled a little bit getting the coordinates zeroed when it came time to sit in front of the actual machine.
That being said, I definitely did a dry run with my hand on the feed speed slider to make sure the machining operations were happening where they should be for each coordinate system and that there were no collisions; good thing I did that because I apparently slipped up when zeroing the tools out and they were going about an inch lower than expect in the z... not sure what happened there, I zeroed them yesterday, shut the machine down overnight then ran the program today without re-zeroing tools.
I also found out that G-wizard feeds & speeds calculator makes the assumption that your machine has unlimited power as I definitely stalled the spindle on a face-milling operation today and I thought I had set my feeds and speeds VERY conservative based on what G-wizard spit out. I'm going to go back and massage that part of the code and try again tomorrow...
ETA: Question regarding the high/low spindle range. I think the facemilling op would have been find if I were in the low spindle speed range, but I need the high range for some other ops. After the mill stalled I reset, changed to low-range, and tried to run it again with the feed rate set even lower (but still the same DOC/toolpath). I immediately got an error that the speed requested exceeded the maximum spindle speed of the machine (the spindle speed didn't go over the max in low range until a few ops later, it wouldn't even start the facemilling op). If I add a M0 stop for speed range changes will that take care of the error?
Makes sense; are you compensating for material removed from side A when you do the program for side B or you're just letting it machine air when it comes to that point? I guess there is no harm in machining air in prototype and low-production cases. The engineer in me often tends to over-focus on optimization and efficiency... haha