I'm in the process of trying to cut some two stroke cylinder exhaust ports on the CNC machine. Normally I'd hand cut these, but in the interest of saving my time I thought I'd give it a try.
Just to put you in the picture I've got a 3 axis machine, so this means that I'll need 3 different settings to get the port cleared to my liking. I've done the 3D model, designed and made the jig, and then fudged 3 mac positions to perform the operation.
The first operation is quite straightforward and I've already done it on half a dozen cylinders. It cam out just as hoped and what would have taken 1 1/2 hours by hand takes 28 mins on the machine with a lovely finish. Now I'm setting up for the next 2 operations.
Anyway, this post is with regards to the boundary selection. At first I just picked the exhaust port exit as the boundary, and this worked fine, but there was a lot of air cutting on the wall that are out of reach from this mac position. Then on the next and final mac positions, using the exhaust port exit again as the boundaries, there's still a lot of air cutting time.
As we're never completely satisfied I was looking for a faster/more efficient option. Selecting faces didn't work. Maybe because there will always be an out of reach face. But tool contact area seems to be what I'm looking for as this produced a much more efficient/faster toolpath.
I'm just running a sim now, and it looks pretty good.
So who else is using this option of boundary selection? What sort of jobs are you using it for? what about settings etc?
Any help much appreciated, and sorry for the rather long post!
Regards,
Matt.