Struggling to understand how to set up Rough and Finishing toolpath

[johnnyt74]

Hi all,

I'm new to Aspire and I'm trying to carve a 3D owl out of MDF as a test.

I initially chose the "finishing" toolpath with a 1.5mm ball nose bit and created a toolpath. The software reported it was going to take 4.5 hours.


I then wondered if I could do a "rough" toolpath first, remove some of the wood that way, and it would speed up my "finishing" toolpath.


So I created a rough toolpath with a 6mm End Mill and it showed on the preview that it had cut some of the wood away.


I then added the "finishing" toolpath directly after the "rough" toolpath in the list, but it still reports that the finishing toolpath will take 4.5 hours?


Am I doing something wrong? Do these toolpaths need 'linking' in some way so the software knows it can do less work on the second toolpath as the roughing toolpath has already completed?


Thanks for any help you can give me on how I correctly use the Roughing and Finishing toolpaths for carving 3D objects.

[ger21]

The Finishing toolpath will always cut the entire model. It always makes one pass at full depth.

The Purpose of the roughing toolpath is to remove a majority of the material prior to the finishing pass. This allows you to use smaller bits that may not be capable of making a full depth finishing pass by themselves.

You need to increase the feedrate to decrease the time. Or increase the stepover value.
3D toolpaths can take a very long time, as you've seen.

[johnnyt74]

Thanks ger21. That makes sense. I'm a bit nervous to increase the feedrate etc in case it impacts too much on performance but I'll do some experimentation.

Thanks again for getting back to me.

[ZASto]

Google "rest machining"
Some tutorials:

[johnnyt74]

Thanks for those links. I'll have a look over the weekend (sorry for the late reply - I've been away on holiday). Cheers