Corner Finishing

[NickMihelich]

Has anyone tried out this new sequence? Was this implemented from pro toolmaker? I have found it to be usefull and pretty solid for finish those hard to get areas.

[SteveLucas]

Nick,

Never noticed that option... I will have to try it.

[NickMihelich]

Try these parameters

[SteveLucas]

Jeez,

Normal roadblock. The part I tried roughed with a 1/8 .01 radius bull nose end mill. wanted to use corner finish with a .015 diameter ball end mill. Can't select the .125 .010 bullnose end mill as first tool. This sucks I do a lot of cutting with bull nose tools.

[NickMihelich]

I was thinking maybe you could create a .02 diam ball end mill to use as a reference tool for your .015 ball. Depending on what your geometry looks like this might work for you.

[SteveLucas · Accepted solution]

Nick,

Sorry it took so long to reply. It has ben a tough week. Trying to get some electrodes cut for our EDM department. One of the electrodes is large so I did the whole thing using the roughing and finishing routines in Pro/Man. I also used the corner routine to pick out some corners.

I roughed with a 3/8 diameter flat end mill then reroughed with a .0625 ball end mill finished with a 1mm diameter ball mill then did the corners with a ,015 ball mill.

It worked fairly well other than needing a cray super computer to calculate the tool path. About 850,000 lines of code.

I am running a Dell Precision Work Station T5500 with a Xeon Processor Windows 7 64 bit with 6 Gigabytes of ram and doing the finishing and corner routines brings it to it's knees. I have the cpu gadget running. it shows 84 percent of all the ram being used and only only 1 of the 4 processors running at about 50 to 80 percent use. So i can definately see that Pro is not multi threaded. The problem I have with the corner routine right now is the tighter you set the tolerance the longer it takes to process the file if it doesn't hang up after about a half hour of processing the ncl file. I like to set it to .0001 but I can't get it to process the file. So right now I have it set to .001 and it seems to work.

I have not cut it yet to see what the finish looks like. I am a little worried there will be scallops in the corners with the tolerance that loose.

[NickMihelich]

No worries Steve I know how it can get sometimes. I agree that not being able to use the full potential of our computers when processing toolpaths is a major issue for me as well.(Dell precison T3500 6 gig ram) As to the long processing times when trying to use the corner finishing sequnce I have found it helpfull to use exclude surfaces. I actually select all the surfaces on the entire part and then unselect the surfaces that I need to finish. This has been somewhat helpfull but by no means is it always successfull. I hope this sequence can be improved in the next few datecodes because it shows promise. If you get a chance could you post any close up pics showing surface finish quality of your coner finish sequnce?

[SteveLucas]

Nick,

Finally got a few minutes to post this. The part is an electrode with some pretty small corner rads. I programmed half then mirrored as you can see in the model tree.

Here are some screen captures of the corner finishing, It seems to work pretty good

[NickMihelich]

Wow that does look really nice! Did you exclude any surfaces? How does the actual part finish look?

[SteveLucas]

Nick,

I did exclude surfaces. By doing that it improved the time to create the ncl file. I have included a picture of one of the gang of 4. It has pretty good resolution so you can see there is not much in the way of scallops or under cuts even with a tolerance of .001 inside and outside