I've somehow ended up with the job of CNC programmer at work for the past few months, as our usual guy is away. I'm using MasterCAM X4 (maintenance update 3), and although it was frustrating at first, I've gotten down a bunch of stuff like contour, pocket, 2D high speed, as well as 3 axis contour surface toolpaths. Currently, we have to make a special shaft for an older piece of test equipment, and we're going to need the 4th axis. Basically, the shaft is a .500" hexagon with some simple features on the flats.
So far, I've tried using the "rotary 4 axis" toolpath and I've tried both rotary and axial cuts. Both get very close to what I want, but not quite. It's doing surface milling stuff, so it requires a ball endmill, which won't work with the features on the part. The rotary toolpath seems to be similar to surface milling in 3d, which isn't what I want.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to have 6 separate planes which I can put features on and for MasterCAM to take care of rotating the part 60 degrees in between the flats of the hex. I know there's a way to do this, but how? I can make multiple WCS's, but how do I make the thing rotate to the correct one?
If you just want to rotate to a particular plane and work on that plane you can select the plane you want inside the operation you are performing. Will probably look something like this.
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4th Axis Planes
