I've been happily running my 2014 for 16 months now and just saw a video that blew my mind a little. Yes, looking back I do wish I had gotten a VF for the extra $ but a TM2P is what I have and needed for my production for long walk away times.
I'm doing more job shop work and cycle times are getting obnoxious. I find I have to throttle HSMXPRESS and Fusion 360 speeds back to prevent the machine from bogging down and shaking.
For example an adaptive clearing on AL with tolerance and smoothing set to 0.05" and Haas finish setting on P2 (forget the code and I'm on the road) I run a 0.5" em at 75ipm with 0.1 woc at 1.25 doc and it still slows and jumps. I watched the video below and can't imagine the vibration my machine would make at those speeds. I tried turning on the HSM option trial period and saw little difference but maybe I did it wrong.
Do you have to constantly change the look ahead setting to achieve such speeds? Is the HSM option really THAT MUCH smoother just reading code faster?
I'm willing to spend the money tomorrow if that would actually be the output but hate wasting $ that could be better spent. I run adaptive clearing with 1.5" em for facing ops on specific production parts in AL and the limiting factor is always the machine stuttering in 1/3 of what "should" be almost arcs based on my setting in the program.
I honstly thought it was mostly a limitation of my machine but now I'm wondering if the HSM option is really that amazing.
have a vf0, vf2, and 2014 tmp2. the tmp simply does not cut as fast as vf's but i dont believe it is meant too.not as rugged so it shakes on heavy fast cutting.
I run an older TM1 and have been using HSMXpress since about 2011 and Fusion for about a year. Here's what I can tell you after a fair amount of fiddling with HSM tool paths.
With the machine slowing down and shaking, there are actually two different things going on. The slowing down is due to data starvation. When trying to do lots of short moves at high feed rates without the HSM option, the motion planner can only look so far ahead of the current position to determine what it will need to do next, so it has to slow the axes down and wait for new data to come in so it can keep going. What the HSM option does is to increase how many lines ahead of the current position the motion planner can look, so that it can do a better job of motion planning. This gets rid of the slow down and stuttering due to data starvation. My guess is this is what you're seeing most of the time.
The other issue you might be having is related to trying to run small radius arc moves at high speed (and therefore acceleration). Compared to the VF series the TMs are fairly wimpy, and they just don't have the power and rigidity needed to deal with high rates of acceleration. I found this out pretty quickly after I enabled the HSM option and tried to run a program that had a lot of small radius arcs at high speed. The control had no problem keeping up but the rest of the machine just couldn't handle it, so it overloaded the Y axis and and alarmed out. It also made some pretty nasty sounding noises. From that point on I learned to limit the feedrate to about 80IPM and set the minimum cutting radius to not allow small radius moves for roughing. If you need to run faster than 80IPM you want to keep small radius arc moves to a minimum.
So what to do? Well, I have the HSM option enabled on my TM1 and it does make a difference. Most of the time it doesn't really matter since I don't do production jobs and machine time is almost never the bottleneck. But I do like having it because it makes the machine run smoother. What also helps is to use the right smoothing (especially) and tolerance settings on the CAM side. Generally the smoothing works the best if it's set to around 2-5 times the tolerance value. Mostly I use 0.0002" for tolerance and 0.001" for smoothing for everything. This is way overkill for roughing but it makes for fairly efficient code and I never worry about finishing accuracy. The settings you have (0.05" for both) won't allow the smoothing to work properly, and I've even found that running the tolerance too loose makes the motion more jerky because it loosens the tangency tolerance between arc and line moves, and you don't get smooth transitions between moves. Try something like 0.01" for tolerance and 0.05" for smoothing. That should help considerably.
Also, since I have the HSM option enabled, I would be happy to try out any problem programs you have to see how they run on my machine.
Glad I could help! Though I would suggest trying out the HSM option for awhile before you spend the money; just to make sure it's really worth it to you.
Going off cygnus comments, you'll find that the HSM takes priority in certain situations but not necessarily high feedrates on their own. On the programming side, any tight-packed changes in direction cause more trouble than anything else. But there's another variable at play, the machine's "rounding condition" which is controlled through settings 191 and 85. You can also control them through the program. You can experiment with it and see what works best...although I warn you that the machine will start to "cut corners" under the roughing condition with a large corner rounding.
A while back I ran some time trials with a particular 3d-surfaced part that I formally made in the past to see how it ran on our Minimill without HSM enabled. The program was filled with XYZ points about every 0.020" or so, in all axes spiraling inward. The results aren't indicative of everything but they are an interesting starting point...
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HSM on TM series machine?
