[hoisee]

Hello everyone,

I am modifying my old post to support tool diameter compensation and I have found that CAMWorks forces disabling tool diameter compensation in the post when posting 2.5X rough milling cycle. Is this a general rule in CNC area? Only do the tool diameter compensation in finishing cycle? It seems reasonable ...... but I've done many jobs to machine my part using tool diameter compensation when doing the roughing cycle( using machine built-in canned cycle, the material is wood and when I don't need the accuracy I only run the roughing cycle, no finishing cycle). Just need to know the standard in this area, thanks everybody

[jame5m28]

Roughing is roughing, you don't need to be that accurate as long as material us left on, finishing is finishing, needs to be accurate, uses comp.

As easy as that really, I'd never use a roughing tool path to finish anything.

[hoisee]

Thanks for your help
Another topic about the roughing is that if I don't use the tool diameter compensation, how can I keep a unique tool database so that I can have the exact tool diameter when generating roughing toolpath?

I plan to keep the tool information(including diameter and length compensation) within a text file or an Access DB file, and modify the post to read in tool info from the file then use G10 to pass these compensations into the machine so that I can keep all tool info in a unique file.... don't know others how to manage the tools, any suggestions?

[jame5m28]

Mostly they use the techdb to control the diameter if the tool and the built in machine offsets to control the length of the tool, depending on your version of camworks you can put your length offset in there too.