Fusion 360 - CAM Heights Tab Explained

[Music] hey everyone Kevin from mechanical vanish calm and today I thought I would do a video on the heights tab found in the fusion 360 cam environment I'm using a part that you can find in the in the cam samples directory and I thought I would just kind of go through some of the different height settings and what they mean and I can use those to your advantage if we look at this part I've got a setup created I've got a little extra stock above it some extra stock to hold on to below it and the stock is a little bit bigger than the part all the way on the outsides so let's start out on this part by creating a 2d facing operation so from the 2d menu I'm going to select face I'm gonna go grab a tool I'm gonna just go to the sample tutorial inch and grab this two inch face Knoll not so concerned with the with the with the tool in this one anyway the geometry we're just gonna machine everything and in the heights now here's when I get to the heights I kind of say it's oftentimes better start from the bottom and work your way up so let's talk about these different height fields I'm gonna start with the top height in the bottom line the top height is where you want your cut to start and the bottom height is how deep you want your cut to go so when we defined our set up we told fusion what the model was we told Fusion how big the stock was or maybe we even selected it from a solid and we already entered the Z arrow in the right orientation the Z arrow dictates diffusion what's top and what's bottom as it relates to this particular set up so everything here at the very top of this part right there that's gonna be my top face I also have things like stock top model top stock bottom selected contours so if we go through and look in this case the top height it's cutting from the top of the stock and it's cutting down to the model top which is exactly what we want for a facing operation if I if I look at the from there's a drop down and you can see these are all the known things that Fusion knows about the clearance site retracted feet height bottom height model top model bottom stock top stock bottom selected contours a selection or an origin so we can fusion understands what each one of those things are so we can use those as reference points for each of for each of these fields you'll also notice that there's an offset so here I could tell fusion that I'd like to you know start we're starting from the stock top but I could say you know what I want to start 20 thousands of an inch above that and I could type in a positive point o 2o number I could also tell fusion I want to start below that height by putting than a negative number in that field same thing with the with the bottom height the bottom height in this case is set to be the model top so we're facing the stock from the top of the stock to the top of the model and it wouldn't make sense to do an offset here but we could maybe we want to come back with another facing operation or a more precise facing operation later on we could leave some stock here so if I put a positive you know point zero one zero that would leave ten thousandths of an inch of stock above the top of the part so these are the two that the two fields that you're most often going to be changing when you're going and doing cam operations inside a fusion let's there's a feed height as well now one of the other awesome things that Fusion does really well in the cam environment is if you hover over different fields it'll tell you what that field is so here we're looking at feed height if I hover my mouse over that a flyout will appear and it gives me a definition of what the feed height is so here you can see what what the feed height is and it also gives you below a little bit more of a definition a shorter definition for each of the other fields however hover over any of these in the boxes and you'll get them more extended for that particular field so for instance top light you can see top light now flies out and gives more information than what top I would show in the bottom little bullet points down there so if we look oftentimes we have to feed height is going to be set to something plus something so in this case feed height is going to be equal to the top height which in our case is stock top plus an offset of 200 thousands of an inch so in this case we know the feet height is going to start two hundred thousandths of an inch above the stock on the part if we look up we have the retract I'd the retract height is set to stock top which is and then plus two hundred thousandths of an inch so in this case the retract height and the feed height are would be would be equal now we look at the clearance sight the clearance height is equal to the retract height so we got to go down one more field to find out what their attract ID is the retract height is the stock top plus two hundred thousandths of an inch so that would start at two hundred thousand seven inch but now we have another four hundred thousand seven inch offset so we're six hundred thousandths of an inch above the stock for our clearance height in this case so sometimes it's helpful to kind of you know look at what it's being calculated from and what the offset value is and clear inside in this case is set to retract height so we got to go down and look what retract I decide to retract I to set the stock top and then we could look at the different fields you know what the top height what the bottom height is so with that let's go ahead and choose okay and just create a facing operation and now let's go ahead and do a 2d adaptive clearing so I'm going to choose to the adaptive chlorine and I'm gonna select a tool in this case I want to grab a little quarter inch flat for the geometry I'm just gonna click on the face if we look and we'll go back to the heights tab now again I'm holding this in the vise so you'll often see in videos and things people just kind of blow blood blow by the clearance height and their track tight and I'm gonna kind of do the same so now on the top height it's cutting from the stock top but if you remember in the last operation we removed the top of the stock we move the stock from the top of the stock to the top of the model so instead we could set this to be model table so now in this case we're cutting from the model top to the selected contour the thing that we selected on and so that's exactly what we want to do now in this case I think I only left 50 thousandths of an inch above the model top for the stock so we're only saving ourselves fifty thousands of an inch but it's just a good idea to get a practice of looking at this for this video I'm not gonna worry about the passes that are linking I'm gonna go ahead and choose okay and now there you see we get a tool path where the spirals down down to the bottom and I do want to look at one thing on the passes tab I want to make sure that I left some stock to leave so I left 20 thousands on the floor and 20 thousands on the wall I'm gonna set this to be 10 in 10 we'll go ahead and hit OK in or recalculate so we left the material on the floor and on the walls now let's do a pocketing operation that will come back and clean up those the floor and the walls so from the 2d menu I'm going to choose to deep pocket I'm gonna use that same quarter inch flat for the geometry I'm just gonna click on that bottom face for the heights in this case we're gonna come back and take a look at this in a minute and in the past is I just want to make sure that we don't leave any stock to leave so with that I'm just gonna go ahead and click OK and there we get a tool path that goes down and it cleans down to the bottom you know face here but if we look in the previous operation we already roughed out this material with the 3d adaptive so there's no reason for this tool to need to spend all that time he looking down to get down just that last 10,000 some material that needs cleaned up so let's see if we can fix some of that on the Heights tab I'm gonna right click and edit this operation then let's go to the Heights tab so here we have works cutting from we're cutting from the stock top to the selected contours in this case I want to cut to the selected contours I don't want to start from the stock top instead when I'm going to choose here is I'm gonna choose selected contours again so in this case we're cutting from the contour we selected two of the contour that we selected so essentially where the tool isn't moving at all it's going down to one plane and doing all this work but we know we left ten thousand seven inch of material so for the offset here I'm gonna enter in point zero one I'm gonna enter ten thousandths of an inch above for the first selected contour right so we're gonna start ten thousandths of an inch above that and we're gonna cut down to the selected contour so we're going from selected contour to selected contour but for the top put the top light we're offsetting that by a positive ten thousandths of an inch let's go ahead and choose okay and there you can see things got a lot better we only have a few helixes in there but that's still a few too many and one other place I'm going to show this is kind of maybe a little bit of a bonus one of the other places that we can change this is we can edit this and we can go to the linking tab and here you can control the ramp now there's different options you could do you could say that you know what I just want to plunge if I if I hit plunge and click OK now it just goes right to that depth with a smaller tool like this in ten thousandths of an inch I'd rather just do a small helix into it so I'm going to edit that and go back to the linking so I'm going to set this back to ramp I'm sorry back to helix for the ramp type and you'll also see that there's a a ramp clearance height that's set to a hundred thousandths of an inch so right now it's telling the helix to start a hundred and ten thousandths above the floor of the part so let's just go ahead and change this to be point zero zero one we'll just give it a very small little helix in and she's okay now you see that we get a helix into the material but we're wasting very little time to get down there so I hope that understand to understand the Heights tab better the clearance height and their attract height become far more important when you start working with clamps on your table or or other things like that that you need to worry about running into so my recommendation would be if you're often going to work in all in a vise is to get the clearance height retract height and feet height values kind of set to defaults that you want and then you can focus on for the operations the top height in the bottom height and making adjustments there thanks for watching if you found this video useful I love it if you'd subscribe and if you have any questions please go ahead and leave them in the comments below have a good day

Channel: Mechanical Advantage

Views: 6,723

Keywords: Fusion 360, CAM, Heights

Id: Qmf44xm0P_o

Length: 10min 56sec (656 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2017