I'm new to feature cam 3d milling, and learning by the trial, error, and coffee method.

I've been able to get tool paths for parts, but instead of just cutting out the part, feature cam is making a path to mill away all the waste material. Is there an easy way to tell feature cam just to cut a groove all the way through on the outside of a curve?

I was thinking of doing an offset from the part, and then telling feature cam to cut a side feature from the part and to cut a side feature from the offset. But this seems like it's more work than it should be.

Any ideas?

Also, has anybody figured a decent way to add tabs to a part?

Thanks,
Dean

Dean,
It sounds like you're talking about 2D milling. If you have a curve already choose boss for outside the line or pocket for inside. You can cancel the roughing and just run a finish pass. There are a few other ways of doing this. You might want to read the section on total stock in the help file. Tabs take a little more time you will have to break your curve into segments, run them as sides.
Gary

Uder your rough tab looking for a milling tab. Go down to total stock and put a value of .100. This will let it rough and do a finish pass. It is in the same place where you set a z depth for rough and finish.

also a neat little trick is set the ramp angle to .5 and the ramp distance 100 it will ramp all the way around then take one pass for a finish

Thank goodness for this group. There's no telling how long it would have taken me to learn that.

This is for my first at home parts. Getting them actually milled out has been another adventure. I'm making router clamps, with an insane ammount of zip ties currently "securing" my router to the z axis. When cutting .75 deep, it looks bout like a 5th axis router.

I think I'm just going to cut a side around the part about a 1/4 inch deep and then take a flush trim bit to them on the router table.

Thanks everybody,
Dean

You can also do just a finish cut. Without the rough step FC cuts out the part without milling everything off. Go to the milling tab for that tool and set the finish passes to more than one to get your size and finish better.