Hi Guys,

Is there any way I can remove unwanted stock when doing a contour profile?

If, for example, you imagine a square piece of billet 100mm x 100mm and you are to cut a triangle out of it using a relatively small diameter cutter. If you go round the profile of the triangle with the cutter it will leave matterial on the corners of the billet.

Can this excess matterial be removed in some way as part of the contour profile?

I hope I have explained this ok.

Steve.

Yes, there's several ways to do it.

Outside of MC, you could bandsaw it off. Or inside MC you could create a pocketing routine with the triangle as the island. (You'll have to create geometry for the outside boundry. Or you could use Muti passes, (not very effecient for triangles). Or you could create geometry for the cutoff areas and pocket that out.

'Rekd

Here's what the pocketing will look like...

You can use a contour with multi pass, then create a trimming boundry and use the Toolpath > Trim Function to trim the toolpath to the boundry.

Trimmed and backplotted

I didn't try that because of the in-efficient toolspaths I've gotten from it before. Is there a way to control it?

'Rekd

Ive only used in on a few occasions where pocketing as you suggested didnt work very well. Playing with the start of the contour and tool up or tool down I was able to get Ok tool paths.

automatic Z level roughing in another program ;)

Originally posted by HuFlungDung
automatic Z level roughing in another program ;)

We can do that too. :D

'Rekd