Fusion 360 - Facing Toolpath Deep Dive

[Music] hi guys I wanted to talk about one of the common things I'm seeing a lot when I'm helping customers on their parts and some of the questions that I'm getting in the training classes and that has to do with doing some facing work so I thought I would use this part to show some different facing options that we can do I haven't created a setup yet so that's the first thing I'm gonna do I'm gonna go ahead and create a setup and by clicking on the setup button and I like where the ucs is located I also the orientation is correct so let's just go over to the stock tab now on this I'm going to use a relative size box I'm going to add sides stock to the sides and top bottom so for the side offset let's put a hundred thousand Stu stock on each side and then for the top off so let's put a pheromone up there let's throw a 1/4 of an inch and let's put a quarter of an inch on the bottom so we can hang on to it in the vise so our final size is going to be about twelve point two in length two point two inches in width and mention a quarter and thickness nothing really else to do so we'll go ahead and choose the OK button so let's jump into the face command and go through some things that I see that happen or an awful lot once you do that I'm gonna go to the tootsie menu and select 2d face and then go select a tool I'm gonna grab a tool out of the tutorial inch folder that you can find on the samples and I'm gonna use the 2 inch face mill so right away the first tab that comes up let's take a little tour through the tabs the first tab is the tool tab this is the tool that we're gonna cut with the feeds in the speeds and feed rates for all these different parameters down here when you create the tool in the library this is what automatically populates but you can go through and change this at any time to whatever value you want the geometry tab this is the region you want the tool to cut sometimes we need to specify the region and sometimes we don't if we look at the heights tab again when you're getting started the two that I want you to pay the most engine two especially if you're not working with clamps on the table are gonna be the top height in the bottom height this is where the cut is going to start and how deep the cut is going to go let's go look at the passes tab some changes here like things we can do this is what happens when the cutter is engaged in the material so step over step down things like that and the linking tab this is how the cutter enters the material exits the material material and transitions between toolpath cuts so let's jump to the tool tab bar to grab my tool tool number one which is a two-inch face mill for the geometry here's where the issue generally comes in if you think about doing a facing operation we're really not facing the part we're facing the stock down to the top of the part so one of the common things I see people do is you know the other visual cue is it tells us that nothing selected there's nothing in selected usually when you see that that means we have to select something so I see people start doing this they start clicking on these regions as the area that they want to face and I'm just gonna hit OK and let's see what we get for tool path so you can see it's sort of did it but it's not going to be the result of that we want when we tell fusion that those areas are what we're clicking out and we're telling fusion that that's where the actual stock is located and there's no other stock so you can see it's doing a more of a rapid move here and a cutting feed right move here because it thinks there's no material between these two little bosses but you know obviously there is so let's go take a look back at the geometry tab and throw the X away what we're seeing right now is the yellow box represents the size of our stock so almost always with facing operations you don't have to make any geometry choices you can just select the stock contours as it is the outside bounds of your stock let's click OK and see what the difference is now notice our our higher speed feed moves are only outside of the stock and not across the part itself let's edit this and go through some more options on the heights we have some intelligence built in to be facing operation right off the bat so let's look at the top light I want you to focus on where it says it's cutting from so it currently says it's cutting from the stock top and it's cutting to the model top so stock top to model top which is exactly what we'd want a facing operation to do so really know no changes need to be made into the heights tab unless you want to leave some material for a final cleanup skim or something like that hop over to the passes tab and on the passes some things to think about here anytime you see a toolpath direction a question inside of fusion cam zero degrees is always going to be aligned with the x-axis so if I look at this once I hit the okay button I know exactly the direction that this tool path is gonna go now it could be maybe you're gonna run on a travel this is a fairly long part twelve inches in one direction only a couple inches in the other and so if that was the case you could simply come in here and type in you 190 degrees and it's gonna face it back and forth instead of going the long way for our purposes we'll leave this at zero the pass extension will extend the cut at the beginning and the end of the part it's going to be the same both ways so sometimes this isn't as desirable there's a different way I'm going to show you how we can kind of change that the stock offset here's a great case if you guys remember when we set up the stock in this part it was 2.2 inches wide and we're using the 2 inch face cutter so one of the things we might want to do is we can just offset the stock a little bit so I'm going to say the stock is actually excuse me a quarter of an inch wider then what it really is so what that means is it's going to be a half inch wider and a half inch longer than what we specified when we created the stock setup another thing that I think is pretty cool is this step over amount it's currently set to 1.9 inches and if you remember we use the 2 inch facing cutter so fusion made a pretty intelligent decision there and we can see how it came up with that decision by right-clicking and editing the expression when I come in here you'll see that there's a formula that's doing a mathematical maximum between these two values inside them which one's big and put placing it into that field I can simply type in 1.8 and now if I were to edit the expression the expression is simply 1.8 so what happens if you made that change and you went man that really want to go back to that formula if that's the case we can right click on that field and choose reset to built-in default and now when we add the expression that original formula is gonna be back there so handy way to do that should you ever make a change and you wanted to go back to what the original why was the direction type currently it's set to go both ways we can also change it to climb or conventional cut and we'll take a look at the differences on what that does actually why don't we just go ahead and click OK right now to accept that so in both ways it's gonna make one pass across do a turn make another pass across if I were to edit that and go back to the passes and tell it I only want to climb cut or conventional cut you'll see that it makes the pass retracts goes back to the beginning and makes the second pass across so that's a way we can make it only climb cut or conventional cut usually climb cutting is the preferred method there all right let's change that back to both ways if we look at words leading in you can see it's it's coming down where the red arrow is and leading up where the green arrow is if we edit that and go back to the passes we could choose from other side and now when I click OK you can see it's leading in over here and leaving out on the other side so maybe I have a tool setter or 4th access or something down here and I want to make sure that I lead in from the right side of the part that's how we can make a change like that I'll edit that and go back to the passes let me turn from other side on now use chip thinning this is a really cool option if you're using harder materials you don't want the cutter to just plow right in the material and kind of shock the cutter instead we can kind of ease into it so I'll hit OK and you'll see what happens there so here you can see the cutter is rolling into the material and it cuts through and then it rolls back into the material again so we're not just shocking the cutter straighten in the material jump back over the passes I'm gonna uncheck that another thing if you remember we've got a quarter inch of material that I left on top of this part so maybe that is too much talked to leave on the top of the part I'm gonna come here and change my maximum step down to B I'm gonna take an eighth inch for a pass so if I hit point one two five when we hit okay now now we'll see that it's it's doing that in two step around we'll edit that again go back to the passes we can also choose to add a finishing step and a finishing feed rate and specify what that finishing step down is going to be so maybe we'll slow this down to thirty inches a minute and we'll do a 15,000 final finishing step so what we're gonna see is we'll have the two step downs and then it leaves a final step down of 15,000 sets programmed at a different feed rate than the to roughing step downs let's edit that again go into the passes I'm gonna uncheck the finishing step so we're just gonna get two eighth inch step downs and I also want to change this to be I'm just gonna climb cut this so if we hit okay let's look at her change our changes that we just made again so we'll see makes one pass goes back makes the other pass comes back to the beginning makes another pass comes back to the beginning so you can see the multiple depths that it's taking I'm gonna edit that and go to the linking tab and kind of show you one of the final changes that I like to make a lot and that is extend the flora track so before I do that let's just go ahead and look at this from a top view and simulate the toolpath with the stock on I'm gonna change it to a different material I'm gonna change it to tail and I'm also going to change it to wall pane I think that's an easier one to look at so we'll hit play and what I want to do is illustrate what happens so as soon as the center of the cutters passed the part or actually on the edge of the stock it retracts off what can happen though is if your machines out of tram that potentially the cutter is still cutting on the backside of the cut and will leave like a little surface mark imperfection kind of where the tooling is still spinning so let's go and see if we can make that a little bit better so I'm gonna edit that toolpath I'm gonna go to the linking tab and I want to turn on this box called extend before retract and what that's gonna do is it extends the cutter by the half a dime of the cutter off the stock before it retracts so let's simulate that same tool path again hit play now I'll just turn the stock on and you can see now the entire cutter gets off of the part before we tracks off so that will help to eliminate the backside cutting marks that you might see on your finish of your part have you not turned that on go ahead and hit up close on that so hopefully those are some nice changes that you haven't played around with yet inside of fusion for the facing environment and as I said one of the things I often like to do is the extended floor tract and that's one of those things I don't remember I don't want to remember changing all the time so in order to lock that in I could try to set that as a default so for instance if I wanted to go to the passes tab and keep this maximum step-down distance or all let's do it with a step over if I right-click I could say make that bit of fault and every time I do a facing operation that's the value that I'm going to come up with if I go to the linking tab and I try to right-click on this box I can't set that as a as a default by doing that all it does when I right-click on it is it unchecks the box for me so instead what I'm gonna do I'm gonna come over to the operation right click and choose compare and edit now this is a this is all the potential options plus a few more that you would have inside of that facing operation so this is all 5 tabs displayed at once and I'm gonna use this little search box at the bottom and I'm gonna type in extend and when I do I'll get extend before retract I'm gonna right click on it here and say make it default and I'll click OK now if we were to check that and make sure everything worked if I come back into another 2d face and I go to the linking tab there you can see extend for track is now set up I hope that helps with some of the facing questions remember oftentimes you do not have to choose a region on your geometry tab for where you want the facing operation to go you're gonna face the bounds of the stock not the part itself if you have any questions let me know in the comments if you like this video give it a thumbs up and if you found the information useful it would be great if you'd subscribe thank you

Channel: Mechanical Advantage

Views: 8,981

Keywords: Fusion 360, CAM, Facing

Id: UjPFO7ROgas

Length: 13min 40sec (820 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 31 2018