Does anyone know if it's possible to get Sprut to show a cylindrical workpiece along the X axis, as in bar stock held in a 4th axis rotary table?

I think I was able to do it. After creating the cylindrical workpiece which defaults along the z-axis, I then defined a new local coordinate system (CS)telling it to rotate the Global mill CS around the y-axis. This resulted in the workpiece lying along the x-axis in the new user-defined local coordinate system. Damn, maybe I'm finally catching onto this software.
Terry

Isn't it possible to transpose the model orientation from the 3-D model view? That seems possible but maybe that is what Terry is referring to. I'm still trying to slog through the manual and not at all up to speed on it.

Mike

Well, I tried everything. It doesn't seem to matter when or in what coordinate system you create the workpiece. It always wants to put a cylinder in the Z axis of the current coordinate system. If someone has got this to work, please let me know how. I think the only other way to do it is to create a "model" of the workpiece and align it along the X axis but I can't figure out how to make a cylinder in Sprut? Reading the manual, it seems like you should be able to create a 2D circle and then extrude it into a cylinder, but it doesn't go it any details on how.

Does anyone else find this software a bit "buggy". I have to kill the application from windows task manager far more often than I would like for $3,000 software!

Something else I found out the other day, all my curves and circles were being machined as small lines instead of G2 and G3 commands. Turns out when you switch from metric to imperial, it doesn't update the "put arcs in toolpaths" values under the job parameters, so a minimum arc of 0.5mm becomes 0.5" so nothing was triggering the circular interpolation. That took a few hours to find, grrrr!

Are you working with build V4 1.28? I just checked and, in imperial units, mine defaults to .020" for "put arcs in toolpaths." Sprutcam fixed a number of imperial units problems in 1.28.

I got the cylinder to lie along the x-axis.
1) choose an operation, i.e. Roughing Waterline
2) select wokpiece -> cylinder -> from centerpoint -> fill in D and LZ, i.e. 1,5
3) workpiece cylinder is shown along the z-axis
4)Goto to top menu bar -> "Create Coordinate System"
5) Click Rotate -> enter 270 degrees around y
6) workpiece cylinder is now lying along the x axis.

Is this what you wanted to do?

Terry

I seem to have gotten a piece of round stock to transpose its axis from Z to X by a different method than Terry used. I created a 1" OD x 5" long solid rod in Alibre with one face aligned to the XY plane and the rod axis centered along Z and then imported it into SprutCAM Expert 4.0 Build 1.28.

Once there I activated the 3D Model tab and clicked on "Full Model" in the list in the top window, which then inserted "Model", "Workpiece", and "Limitations" to a list in the second window down on the left side of the screen. Once "Model" in that list is clicked, the tabs below the "3D Model" icon become active (un-greyed) and the Transpose tab is available. Clicking on that pops up the Spatial Transformations dialog box, from which "rotate" is available. I then clicked on the "Rotate" tab to get a dialog box with more options - select the "Y-axis" for Rotate Around, enter 90 in the Rotation Angle field, click OK and the rod was then aligned along X.

Hope that helps,

Mike

Terry,

I tried it again your way and it does rotate the workpiece along the X axis but when you run the machining operation all the toolpaths are along the X axis as well, which doesn't help. If you change the parameters of the machining operation to work in the new coordinate system, then it just flips everything back to the Z axis.

Mike,

I tried something very similar to your idea. I created a rod in Solid Works and imported it into the "workpiece" folder in the 3D model tree. I then made it invisible so I could see the model and in the machining operations I was able to select it as the workpiece and everything is working great :)

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'm realising that Sprut Cam is very powerful but not always obvious in the way it thinks.

Andrew

I'm realising that Sprut Cam is very powerful but not always obvious in the way it thinks.


That's an understatement from my perspective! It would sure help if there were several good tutorials that took one from importing various types of 3D models through to simulated machined parts. I'm beginning to think that a big hurdle will be overcome when I start to understand many of the terms used in the manual.

Mike