[pejaer]

Hi All,

I attempted some 3D surface milling for the first time (newbie here). Can anyone give me some pointers or rules-of-thumb that cleans up the side walls? As you can see in the attached, the longer half round which is .076" dia. (which I am doing with a .040" dia. ball mill) has two long extra material on the sides. My thought was to do a finishing operation that will move in the Y axis (up and down the channel) before stepping over in the X...but I get a lot of rest material with this method also, depending on the step move....maybe that is the way to do it, but make the step .001 (i.e. very small)?.

I understand that I could buy a ball mill at .076" (or close to it) to do the channel, but I'll have the same issued in the other pocket and I need to use a small BM here anyway.

Thanks for any input.
Paul

[Scott_M]

Hi Paul

On the "strategy" tab of the Finishing plane operation put a check mark in the "Scallop" box and set the allowable scallop size. It was .008" in your file try something like .001" and see if that will meet your needs. Or smaller.

Scott

[pejaer]

Scott,

Thanks for the input. I see now I was overlooking some of those strategy features....model looks great now (at least in the simulation).

I made corrections to both the rough planing and finish planing, but I have to say I am not 100% sure what was the true fix....what I mean is, your direction was dead-on, but in practice I got a couple of errors, one is this gouging that happened in the rough planing (see PDF)...in addition to playing with the parameters to get rid of it, I noticed that the "fast calc" box was checked, and I removed that...seemed to help...and at the end looks good, BUT : shouldn't Sprut be automatically avoiding this gouging? Why so much manipulation is needed? Or is it my fault that I gave Sprut conflicting tasks somehow? I thought maybe I have a tolerance setup somewhere that is too loose (-.005 or so...) but could not find this.

I also got an unexplained error in the finish planing, and looking at the string path, everything looked fine...but ultimately I got rid of this too through some more parameter playing. I did take away more stock (from .010 to .005) in the roughing op, and think that made a difference.

Thanks again fro getting me down the right road...

Paul

[Scott_M]

Hi Paul
Glad you got it going.

If you hover over the red ! it will tell you what the error is.

Scott