5-axis Variable Surface Area Toolpath

Hello guys, today i want to go over an alternate tool path for contour profile. Of course contour profile is a great tool path for swarf cutting walls using your 5-axis machine to cut normal. So let’s create our operation.

All right let’s choose Surface area

I’m going to pick my walls under specified drive geometry

I’ve picked my cut direction.

If you’ll notice with the surface area you don’t get just a value for step down into numbers or scalloped. Now if you want to control it by you, you can enter that into your vertical limit horizontal limit will just give you more points

I need to flip the direction of cut material, so this area arrow is pointing in all.

All right so i’m going to do towards drive for a cavity but then swarf drive

Next i’m going to specify the swarf direction and pick the vertical arrow that’s normal to the wall

Let’s generate it

So as you can see it’s good-looking toolpath but we have some extra cutting at the bottom on the floor.

Now let’s adjust some values related to the cutting step

Then i’ll go ahead and turn on smoothing to give us a little bit better options

Let’s Specify cut are

Then i’ll pick the walls as the cut are

Generate it again.

We have a pretty good toolpath on our walls we would just need to limit . We’ll go ahead and do it clean up on the bottom. So one way you can limit that is a trim by trimming your tool path.

So it should be this one here

You’ll see the top or the bottom came up a little bit.

Let’s generate it again

You can see the cutter is normal to the wall and floor. See you next time.