Side Milling

[eliot15]

Hello,

Today I had a quick job drilling and cutting some material off of this clip.



I grabbed the green portion in a Kurt vise and ran an end mill across the red part taking .100 cuts. I've attached a .vnc file showing how i did it. Six contouring passes with the "Stock+/-" parameter on the first pass set to .460 and the "Stock+/-" parameter on the last pass set to 0.0. Best I could come up with in the heat of battle.

There's got to be a better way to side mill like this.

I've attched a file. Ops 1-7 are how I did it. Op 9 is how I'm trying to do it with a single roughing pass.

The Problem:

My entry move is all wrong. I want to take .05 cuts. The entry move (and first pass) take the radius of the cutter. Plus the first pass starts from the right. I want it to start from the left and take a .05 cut.

Here's the bad first pass:



All the remaining 6 or so passes look correct. They each start from the left, .05 cut, retract, return, like this:



The Op finishes like this:



If I could just get the the Op to start from the left with a .05 cut, I'd be golden, but I've been pushing buttons since a got home from work 3 hours ago and no luck.

Any help appreciated.

[montie]

I would just use a line, not a pocket and use the offset contour in the plugin menu

[canyon289]

This plugin looks promising but when I tried it only worked in the positive Y direction. How do you change the step direction?

[eliot15]

I took a quick look this morning, and it appears that what the offset contour plugin buys my is automating the approach I actually used: creating 7 seperate operations, and decrmenting the "Stock+/-" value by .100 for each operation, until the final operation cuts at my contour. I just created each operation manually, and manually tweaked the "Stock+/-" value.

Maybe thats the only way to do it. Maybe it can't be done in a single operation.

It seems a bit hacky to me but I guess it makes sense. Use offsets to leave material on the contour for future cleanup kind of idea.

I can work with that.

Thanks. The offset contour plugin is a definite time saver.

[cadman]

This plugin looks promising but when I tried it only worked in the positive Y direction. How do you change the step direction?

It works with any contour shape and not a specific direction. You must be doing something wrong.

[cadman]

This plugin looks promising but when I tried it only worked in the positive Y direction. How do you change the step direction?

Ok. I think I understand what you mean by direction.

The way the plugin works is the offsets are always descending based on the direction of the original contour. This would be the logical direction. If you want something different, change the direction of the original contour or add one going the opposite direction and offset that one too.

The con of the offset plugin is multiple processes which can add up depending on how many offsets you create.

The pro is you can edit each of the processes individually, something not possible with a single process. I do this a lot.