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My Monday morning annoyance with Creo is with the way I rough large diameter bores. I generally use a mill window with a helical ramp into the part. Then do a spiral rough tool path out to the required diameter with stock left on the profile.
This method seems really efficient to me but the major problem I have is I would like the end of the tool path to have a lead off amount to get the cutter off the wall for the retract out of the bore. I set all the parameters in the sequence for this lead off but I will not work.
Picture of the tool path with the cutter retracting straight up the wall.
what I have found is you need to go into the tool motion and manually add a lead out to get this to work at the end in order for the lead out to work even though the parameters are set.
I think this is another problem with the software.
Similar troubles with volume milling. The only way I've found is to create the paths with a suitable profile stock allowance, then do an additional trajectory mill that has the lead-in and lead-out that I want. Lame method, but it works.
Another annoyance, while we're on it, if you're doing stepped cuts, and define a lead-in or lead-out, the lead-in is only applied to the first step, the lead-out only to the last. Forces me to do a lot of copy/paste of the same toolpath definition, with a change of z-depth for each.
Ken,
What I do instead of stepped cut in Z in a lot of instances is a helical trajectory. then you only have one lead in at the top and lead out at the bottom. I do this mostly on bores over an inch where I have a drilled start hole and roughing to a small stock amount for a finish pass.