Fusion 360 Tutorial | CAM Basics

hello everyone my name is austin shainer and welcome back to my channel in almost every episode or video that i've created so far you guys have flooded me with requests to do cam tutorials in fusion 360. clearly that is a common pain point you all are facing in your designs where you're able to actually maybe model and generate the vision for your design in the cad portion but you're having trouble figuring out how to tell fusion exactly what you'd like your machine to do especially depending on your particular machine's constraints so i would love to just jump straight into how to program the cam for guitars but that's actually a very complicated design and in order to be successful at that i feel like we need to take a quick step back and cover some of the fundamentals because oftentimes where i get hung up in cam for example is i start jumping right into all my complicated you know 3d contours and 3d adaptive tool path strategies and trying to figure out how to do that but i didn't actually set up my stock correctly or i didn't set up my tools correctly or my feeds and speeds etc and so it would be really good to actually go back start with a simple design and work our way up to guitars so i'm going to make this a three-part series we're in the first episode which is today we're going to be covering the absolute basics such as setups toolpath strategies and actually just generate some simple g code that we're going to need to cut out this gift box design that i've made and then in episode 2 we're going to be going over the order of operations that's a really important topic and what it means is that we pay attention to the progress of our design as it goes through the manufacturing process so for example i don't want in operation one to cut off something that i'm actually going to need in operation two in either either to hold on to the part or to zero my work offsets or have some critical dimension to measure off of that i need in order to get the information i want so order of operations is a really critical step particularly in two-sided machining where you you machine one side of the part and then you flip it over and you machine the other side of the part and that seems to be where a lot of people get hung up because it can be kind of tricky to nail and get right and you kind of have to have some discipline in how you go a pro go about approaching both your cam and also the setup on your actual machine order of operations is a topic important enough to warrant its own video so i'm going to go ahead and make that its own video in episode 2 and then as we get better with both the fundamentals and understanding our order of operations then we can go ahead and take those skills and apply them to our guitar that we designed in guitars in fusion 360 series and so then we'll be able to actually machine one side flip it over machine the other side maybe just enough so that that way i can put on the laminated top and then continue machining and so that way i understand the order of which things need to be completed and i understand how to achieve those tool pass strategies so that way i can actually be happy with the results we get so let's not waste any more time and let's get started with the gift box so this gift box was actually something i made for my wedding so it was a groomsman gift box that i gave to both my two brothers and two of my best friends where i gave them an everyday carry kit and so i gave them a nice kershaw knife i gave them a really nice refillable pen and also a black label whiskey miniature and what's interesting is that even though i gave them a nice knife and a pen and some whiskey they were most impressed and most interested in the box itself because i did a really good job machining it it turned out beautiful here you can see a picture of what that actually looked like i ended up grabbing some scrap walnut from my local lumber yards there were some off cuts and so what i ended up doing was trimming that up on the table saw and then bringing it over to my cnc to machine down to a uniform thickness and then i actually profiled that and then i also grabbed some african mahogany from i believe it was rockler my local rockler shop and i did the same thing there i planned it down to a universal thickness and then i went ahead and machined the pockets so let's go ahead and get started with the tray now because this is an assembly i'm going to go ahead and open the tray up and do the cam for the tray in its own file and i'm going to do the lid in its own file as well you don't have to do that you can do it all within its own design but that also introduces some a little bit more difficulty in how you approach your setups so i think it'll be easiest to show this way so let's right click the base or the tray as i just called it and say open now if i open this up the first thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to measure our finished product so the overall dimensions the height the width the length so we have a height of one and a half inches we have a length of nine inches and we have a width of five inches so we know that we need our stock that we're going to be cutting this out of to be at least nine inches by five inches and one and a half inches tall so let's go ahead and swap over to the manufacturing workspace so you go hit up here where it says design go to manufacturer and now we're in the manufacturing workspace now i already have a setup with the tool paths that i chose to run on my design and i'm going to go ahead and show you guys how to do this from scratch so let's go ahead and create new setup that should typically be the first thing you do go ahead and create new setup and you can see that it's trying to apply a automatically generated stock now you can either use this if you'd like or you can create your own stock so if you know that you're going to be cutting it out from a 12 by 16 inch piece you could go ahead and make that 12 by 16 inches what i typically do first before i set the dimensions of my stock is i typically set my work coordinate system so that means what direction is my x y and z pointing in so you can imagine if i put this on my c and c and my y direction is this way my x is this way and my z is up then it would be cutting in this orientation but what if i actually because of the shape or design or how i want to set this up on my cnc i want the x to be running in this direction and the y in this direction and maybe i want to start all my programs from the same corner so what we can go is we go work coordinate system stock point right now it's selected to the center point and you can if you'd like to you can go ahead and measure off the center of your stock and do it that way i typically measure off the corner and i think most people do too as well so click stock point and you can select any point on this stock that's already available and it will bring your work coordinate system to start from that location now we just need to tell it which direction or which orientation is the x y z facing so then you can go orientation and you can choose one of these so you can select your x and y axes you can select which axis your z is in if you want to flip your z so typically you can just do select x and y so for x i want my x to be going in this direction and don't be afraid it automatically transferred it over there so you can go back to stock point bring it back here now you see that my z is flipped right so now i want to say my y is in this direction now you'll notice that the y didn't actually orient correctly but that's okay because it's still traveling in y so what i can come over here is say flip y axis so that'll rotate it from this side of the center point to this side of the center point so i've come over here and hit flip y axis and now we can see that my x is going in this direction my y is here and my z is going up that's exactly what we want now at least i know that that's what i want for my machine now typically by default the model section is already selected for you if you only have one model that you're machining but if you have multiple models in the same design you might want to select which model you're you're choosing your stock off of so for example if this wasn't selected i could then come over here and say this is the model that i'm trying to machine and all of this would then apply so now what we want to do is we want to go ahead and set up our stock so we have our work coordinate system set up now we want to tell it okay what's the size of material we're actually going to be machining this product out of so there's a couple different options there's fixed size box where you can give it very specific dimensions of what what the size of stock you have to work with is you can go relative size box box and what this does is it creates an offset from your model so i can say that i want my stock to be a half inch wider than my model or a half inch longer or a half inch taller than my model so it's relative to the size of the model i can go fix size cylinder if i'm cutting it from around relative size cylinder same thing fixed size tube so hollow or i can go from solid and from solid can be really useful because basically what that is is i go ahead and model my stock so if i just create a square or a rectangle that's the size of the stock i want i can then select that and make that my stock and that can be really helpful for doing simulation but in most cases you're probably just going to either do fixed or relative size box so in this case what i'm going to do is i'm going to do relative relative size box and i'm going to say that i want the sides to be half inch wider than the model and i'm going to say i want the top so let's look at it from this side right now the model is touching the bottom of the stock and it's leaving material on the top so if i wanted to say i want my top to be a quarter of an inch taller than my model so it leaves a quarter of an inch on top and then i could say okay well do i want an offset on the bottom so i could say well i want to also add a bottom to my stock so that way my part is kind of sitting in the middle of this blank that we're going to end up cutting out of and then you can go round up to the nearest you know eighth of an inch or something it doesn't matter typically you'll just leave that at zero you don't change that very often so what i'm going to do is i'm going to leave an eighth of an inch on both sides of the top and bottom and a half inch on each side so that way i have something for my clamps to hold on to in fact let's go ahead and give that a little bit more let's go three quarters of an inch on both sides oops three quarters of an inch on all sides of the model so that way i have something for my clamps to hold onto and then i've got an eighth of an inch on both the top and the bottom so that way i can run a facing operation to guarantee that my stock is going to be a uniform thickness and both the top and bottom faces will be parallel with each other once i've got that set i'm basically done with my setup and i can hit ok and so now all of the programs that we're going to create or all the tool paths are going to generate starting from this location and that's really important to remember because that means that i'm going to take my end mill and i'm going to zero it on this face and then i'm going to take it and zero it on this face and then i'm going to establish my z height let's bring that back up i'm going to establish my z height on top of this surface and then once i've got that and i apply my work offset on my cnc machine then i can start cutting so now that we've got our stock set up we're ready to start choosing our tool path strategies now there's two different types of tool path strategies okay there's actually a lot more than that but there's two main categories let's say there's 2d toolpath strategies and 3d and the most there's two main differences there's there's a lot more than that but really there's two main differences that you should be concerned about the first one is 2d strategies typically start at a given height so let's say up at the top of the stock then it will plunge down let's say a quarter of an inch and then cut whatever profile we've told it to and then it will then go down another quarter of an inch and cut that profile go down another cut that profile so you're really only ever working with one or two axes at any given time you're typically not working with both the x y and z moving all at the same time and so that's typically where 3d tool packing strategies come in is where my machine is actually moving in both x y and z all at the same time now there are some exceptions to that because in 3d tool pathing you have like adaptive pocket clearing right so it might actually plunge down cut portion of it cut down and cut another portion of it and you'll actually basically achieve the same thing but here's where the bigger difference between 2d and 3d toolpaths come into play 2d toolpaths are typically additive in nature and what i mean by that is so if i go up here and i just say 2d pocket right right now it's not actually cutting anything it has no idea what i'm going to cut and so then i would then come into the geometry tab and we'll explain all these in a moment but i would come into the geometry tab and say well i want to cut this contour and so i've then gone from not cutting anything to selecting what i would like it to cut and so then i could add like i want to also cut just that little section or just that little section so 2d typically starts with nothing and then you add constraints of where you want it to machine 3d tool paths on the other hand so if i come up in here and i say pocket clearing similar a similar type of strategy to 2d pocket but right now if i just hit ok it's going to assume i want to machine everything within the boundary and so it starts by cutting everything and instead you then limit it to only certain areas so again 2d toolpaths start by cutting nothing and then you add in the specific areas you would like it to machine 3d toolpaths typically evaluate your entire model and say i'm going to cut everything that i see here and then you one by one eliminate what you don't want it to cut so where do you start well if you are going to be introducing stock that already has a uniform thickness you typically don't need to do a facing operation so if let's say you cut your stock to a rough trim on the table saw and then you run it through a thickness planer or a joiner etc then you typically don't need to do a facing operation if you have more raw stock or something that's maybe warped a little bit that you need to flatten out before you do anything else you'll typically want to do a facing operation so for the case of this example we're going to assume that you want to do a facing operation so i can go ahead and hit face and let's just go and hit okay and see what it does so what it's automatically assuming is that you want to mill down from the top of your setup stock so you can see that the setup stock has an eighth of an inch on top and if i just hit okay it's taking off that eighth of an inch and you can see that it's now flush with the top of my model which is right here and so it's milling off everything on top of the stock that's not your model but let's say that that automatically generated tool path doesn't really cut it for us because right now we don't know what bit it's using we can kind of see that it's using a full step over meaning if this is a quarter inch bit it's kind of stepping over a full quarter of an inch and maybe we don't want to do that because that's going to overload our tool and maybe we don't want it to cut in the x direction maybe we want it to cut in the y so now we can actually go back into that tool path and make some changes so let's go and hit edit and in the tool we can now go select now right now because i've recently while developing this video i already had a quarter of an inch flat end mill selected but if you go into tool it'll bring up the tool library now thankfully autodesk has a ton of tools already available that will likely work for your design and you don't necessarily need to add your own tools but you can actually create your own tools so if i hit the plus sign i can say well i want to add a flat end mill and then i want to give it the dimensions that i want and then i can save that in my own user library so that i can you know let's say i have a bunch of tools available in my toolbox and i want to have all of those in fusion 360 so that way going forward i can just select the tools i have rather than working from the automatically generated ones from autodesk i typically don't do that i typically use the ones automatically available because i'm just trying to simulate so as long as i'm using a cutter with the right diameter then that usually works for me but there has been times let's say when i'm doing like a chamfer a chamfer operation or a round over or something and i have a very specific size tool that i've gone ahead gone ahead and added my own tool now i'm not going to show you how to add these today i might save that for another video but for now in most cases you can just use their automatically generated ones you can see that i have some of my own library set up but what i can do is i can say i want a milling flat end mill and let's say i want to grab it from the fusion 360 library and i could search in there so i could just say 1 8. so i have a 1 8 inch flat end mill or i can go quarter inch flat end mill and it had it doesn't know whether it's an up cut or a down cut etc it's basically just giving you a tool body that it's going to use to simulate this operation so if i hit go ahead and hit select quarter inch flat end mill now we can see that it's right here now underneath that we have coolant so do you have coolant enabled on your um cnc machine or not if yes if you have a coolant option it will add uh an m and m code to go ahead and turn on your coolant and so if you don't have that or sorry if you do have that you'll want to disable it if you're doing this in wood if you're doing it in aluminum or something you might choose yes i have missed air suction etc so i'm going to go ahead and hit disabled and under feeds and speeds now feeds and speeds is an enormous topic and so i don't have enough time in this video to go through this in detail so i'm just going to apply what i typically do for my designs but this is going to be highly dependent on what your machine is capable of so spindle speed i typically type in 16 000 rpm to start with because that's the bottom range of the router that i have i have a dewalt trim router hooked up to my cnc and that's the bottom range of that so i start there and i can always speed it up so i go 16 000 rpm i ignore the surface speed for now and i ignore the ramp spindle speed for now and i go straight to cutting feed rate so i'm saying i want to spin my router at 16 000 rpm and i want my cutting rate cutting feed rate let's say to be 7 75 inches per minute there we come on let's just do 75 i think it's already inches per minute go back edit yep sorry about that so 75 inches per minute and at 16 000 rpm and 75 inches per minute every revolution of my end mill is going to cut basically one and a half thousandths of an inch from the wood and that's a decent that's a decent feed per tooth for wood you could definitely pr i could probably go much more aggressive with that in wood whereas you know in aluminum i'd probably want to keep it pretty low so i could actually probably go a lot higher than this so if i go to like let's say 120 inches per minute i could have two and a half thousands feed per tooth and that's probably a pretty good number for wood lead-in feed rate so what this is is how fast is the cutter moving as it's entering your stock so i can say well i want it to move into my stock slowly but then i want it to pick up speed once it's actually cutting so i could say 60 etc and oftentimes i will just leave that the same but you can absolutely change it if you get better results that way ramp feed rate is kind of the same thing but typically from the z-axis so as it's ramping down into the material how fast is that z-axis moving that also is the same thing with the plunge feed rate so the plunge limit correction the plunge is actually how fast the axis is moving the ramp feed rate is how fast the x and y are moving as it's spiraling down so i can say ramp feed rate let's do 60 as well plunge feed rate we'll just keep it 40 and this is just giving you a feed per revolution based off of the information that you gave it above now i fully realized that i rushed through that again beads and speeds is a really big topic and we can probably never reach the bottom of what are the right feeds and speeds but as we go to actually making projects on this channel i might touch base more on feeds and speeds and how to calculate them for different types of materials so now that we've got the first tab set we typically move left to right so you figure out your tools you figure out your feeds and speeds then you figure out what you want to cut now in the facing operation this is pretty standard it just cuts based off of the stock down you typically don't add anything to this so we will go back more into this tab as we start cutting our pockets the heights tab determines where is the cut going to start and how far down into the material am i actually cutting so in this case it's automatically selected for me because it's a facing operation again facing is probably not the ideal candidate to show you this so we will go into the heights a little bit later but right now if we're assuming that we're cutting off all of the material above our model we can leave that be now we know that we want it to cut down to this section but maybe we want to do it in multiple paths like maybe we don't want to take the full eighth of an inch off we want to do it in two 16 inch passes sorry 16 of an inch passes so now i can come over to passes and i can say okay i've got my tolerance my past direction so this would change the orientation so if i just go ahead and hit okay and i hit 90 degrees now it's cutting in y-axis instead of the x-axis or i could say i want that to be 45 degrees now it's going to cut in both x and y so go back to edit let's go ahead and leave this at zero for now which brings it back to the x direction go back to our passes pass extension tells me how far off of the stock do i want that pass to go so let's say one inch so this will be dramatic let's go one inch so it's actually going to travel off of the stock by one inch and so i know that i want it to start outside of the stock and then come in and then come out and then go back up for each one so i can go edit let's go ahead and leave that back to zero stock offset is kind of the same thing but instead of doing it just on the single pass orientation it will actually apply that to the entire boundary so essentially it believes that it's cutting something larger than the stock itself so if i say one inch again what it's going to do is it's going to apply one inch to all sides of the stock so basically i'm telling it that my i want it to pretend like my stock is larger than it really is and cut kind of cut air until it reaches that and then it will extend off of the stock let me go back to edit and let's keep working through this so step over is after every pass how far is the bit going to move into the material so if i have a quarter of an inch bit and i tell it quarter of an inch it's going to move an extra quarter of an inch after every pass and it's going to cut now if i say an eighth of an inch that means half of my bit will be engaged with the material so i could say 0.125 hit ok and you can see now i have way more lines and let's see if i can look at it from this angle so as it travels up here and comes back around you can see that the midpoint of my bit would be on this line and so half of my material would be engaged and we'll simulate this in a minute so let's go back to edit passes direction do we want climb cutting or conventional cutting or both ways so i can talk about more about that in a future video but essentially on cnc machines typically you want to climb cut so you want the rotation of the bit to be moving in the direction that the axis is moving in conventional is typically what you'll see on a mill so you want or like a table saw for example this might be a good way to explain it so conventional cutting is i'm pushing into the rotation of the bit so i have friction pointing towards me but let's say if you wanted to climb cut on a table saw which by the way i do not recommend because that is extremely unsafe on a table saw is if i grab my material from the back side of the table saw and i pushed it towards the front then it's going to try to throw my material that way and that's kind of what climb cutting does but climb cutting and a cnc is far more controlled and so i could actually or just say both ways so let's see what happens when i select climb only and i hit ok you can see my tool path has changed a lot so what it's going to do is it's going to travel down here travel up come back all the way without cutting anything travel back down and cut the next one up come back down cut the next one so i i'm telling it that i only want it to cut in one direction so if i go back to edit and i do conventional it'll do the same thing but it'll start the tool path from this side come over up come back down keep cutting and up etc for facing operations you typically don't need to care about this at all so i can say edit and i just go both ways which means it'll keep the bit down and it will just keep cutting it'll just zigzag back and forth and cut its way through the material so let's go back to edit and then there's you don't usually have to worry about chip thinning or anything like that when it comes to wood this is more for professional machines but you will use stock to leave in multiple depths quite a bit so multiple depths is where you tell it where i don't want it to cut a full eighth of an inch i want it to cut in sixteenth inch layers at a time so i can say multiple depths the maximum step down would be a sixteenth of an inch so sixteenth of an inch and i can just hit ok so now you've got two layers of program so you've got the first pass which is a 16th of an inch into the stock i lost that there and then once it's done doing one layer all the way across it'll come up travel all the way back and start again right here and do another layer and so that way i'm only cutting a 16th of an inch at a time so come back and hit edit first of all let's get rid of our stock offset and now what if i wanted to leave a little bit of stock for like a finishing pass or something well i can hit stock to leave and in this case because it's only cutting axially which means it's not cutting it's cutting down it's not cutting side to side as much i could then change that but we'll apply that more when we get to the pockets and then finally in the linking tab you kind of tell it how do you want the machine to interact between each of these tool paths so i could say i want it to rapid retract out of each time that it's done cutting and retract up and come back over or i could say no i actually want to keep the tool down as much as humanly possible so i want the machine to limit how many times it picks up and moves to a different location leads in lead in transitions basically says okay do i want a lead in and in this case no i don't really because i'm just facing so this is going to be something that we're going to cover in the in the other tool paths so i'm going to uncheck those hit ok so in this case it's just going to plunge straight down and immediately start cutting in 16th of an inch increments and after every time it moves all the way across it'll come over an eighth of an inch and keep cutting okay so moving on now we want to go ahead and cut all the surface or all the material we need down to this surface so in this case we can do either a 2d pocket or 2d adaptive clearing now the main difference between these two is a 2d pocket will basically let's go and hit okay and let's see what it does real quick let's go i want to cut down to this face and hit okay now actually that's interesting because i actually select it's only cutting the face that i selected i didn't select the boundary so if i come back to edit geometry and instead of selecting that face i say i want it to cut let's unselect that i wanted to cut this profile everything in this profile now if i this little red arrow means do i want it to cut to the outside of this line or to the inside of this line so if i wanted it to cut everything to the outside i would flip it over but no i wanted to cut everything to the inside if i hit ok you can see what it's going to do it's basically going to leave it's going to cut in the offset that i set typically in a square or round pattern but the problem with this is that as you get into these corners it's going to engage significantly more material so you're going to have big spikes in the load on your tool as it comes into the corner which isn't necessarily a problem for wood because it's a pretty easy material to machine through but if you were doing aluminum you might get a lot of chatter in that corner because all of a sudden you're overloading the tool so a 2d adaptive what it does let's go ahead and select this hit okay you can see it's a very different type of tool path so it's going to maintain no matter where it's at any corner or anything it's going to maintain the same pressure let's say on the tool throughout the tool path and what's really cool about that is you can actually often times if you control that you can cut significantly deeper and that's called high efficiency machining where you're using more of the bit to cut sideways than you are just using the little bit of the tip cutting down so i'm actually just going to leave it with this but let's go and hit edit and let's check our feeds and speeds so it still has the quarter of an inch flat from the previous and it still has all my settings from the previous so it remembers what my last operation was i'm telling it i want to cut down to that surface let me check my heights so my bottom height is from the selected contours so we selected this corner right here so it's going to cut down to that my top height is from the top of my stock so my stock had an eighth of an inch on top now that's actually gone but that's okay because now we just faced all that off but that's okay because we don't necessarily want it to start cutting right here maybe we want it to start moving down from a section a little bit higher than the model and that it's just an added safety layer retract height is coming up 0.2 inches from the top of the stock to right here so anytime it pulls the tool out of the material it's going to come up to that that line and then the clearance height is when it needs to actually move out of the way let's say and let's say i have a bunch of clamps attached to my model when i'm cutting it i might say i want a clearance height to be one inch above that so that way no matter what as it's moving out of the way i'm never going to run into my clamp or anything so that's kind of a safety height i know that the machine can safely move anywhere it needs to at this height passes we could do this in one or two passes in this case because we're doing high efficiency machining or adaptive clearing we'll just go ahead and leave that without stock to leave no multiple depths it's just going to go ahead and cut that as is and now we can go ahead and move on to our pocketing operations now i apologize there's one really important thing to check when you're doing an adaptive clearing so if i go back to edit passes the optimal load this determines how much of the cutter is engaged in the material at any given time so it's going to maintain 0.1 inches what it's saying right now is it's going to maintain 0.1 inches into the material at all times no matter whether it's in a corner or not so maybe i don't want to engage half almost half of my bit in the material maybe i only want it to engage ten thousandths of an inch so i could go point zero one zero and what it'll do you'll see the tool path gets insanely large because it's only going to engage a little bit of material on every rotation now to save ourselves some time loading that let's say 0.25 now you'll notice it gave me an error message saying that if you're using this strategy you can't engage more than the actual bit is and that obviously makes sense so let's go and hit ok change it back to 0.1 and we're back to where we were so now that we've faced the top and we've cut down our first section let's go ahead and cut the first pockets so let's go ahead and do adaptive clearing again now we could do this as a 2d pocket but i know that since there's inside corners here i want to go ahead and do adaptive clearing we still have our same speeds and feeds now i want to select okay i want it to cut inside this boundary this boundary and this boundary and let's go to our heights so it's saying selected contours is what it's going down to i could change that and say selection i want it to go down all the way to the bottom surface or let's say actually i wanted to cut that profile but i only want it to cut up to here which that wouldn't actually make sense in this case but the tool path cannot go below that bottom height so in this case i'm just going to go back to selected contours and we should be good there passes now i don't want the bit to plunge all the way down so let's actually let's see what that looks like so you can see what it's going to do here is it's going to plunge that bit all the way to the bottom of the stock and then it's going to start rotating out and that's a big problem because that's a lot of cut engagement on that cutter so in this case we want to go back to passes multiple depths and let's say we wanted to cut a 16th inch up at a time actually let's make that an eighth of an inch so we want it to step down an eighth of an inch every single time it goes through a layer optimal load would be 0.1 inches do we want it to cut both ways same thing as before do we want it to pick up after every time it makes a pass or do we want it to just keep zigzagging between so i know that i want it to go ahead and zigzag between and i will show you guys kind of a video of what that looks like in a minute and then i don't want it to leave i don't want to leave any excess stock so i'm going to hit okay and you can see what it's trying to do so it's doing layer by layer it's going to come in cut the top layer come down cut another layer but we ran into a problem already so you can see that the first layer is actually parallel to this top surface so it's cutting from here down but we've actually already removed that material from here to here so we we need to change our top height to start from this location so if i go edit and let's go heights we want our top height not to come from stock top we want this to go from selection to right here if i hit okay going to regenerate the tool path and the cut is going to start an eighth of an inch down from the top of our stock so it's going to come down and remove this material first then come down and move and remove another eighth of an inch so that's what we want so at this point let's go ahead and simulate this what we've done so far so that way we can see what's going on so if i right click my setup and i can go simulate now you're presented with the tool and if i hit play let's take this scroll bar and you can slow that down so what it's doing first is it's facing the top of the stock taking a 16 16 of an inch at a time let's speed this up a little bit so it's going to cut that first and then it's going to come back into another layer and now it's clearing out that inside pocket down to the surface where our cavities start and it's doing it in a circular pattern in order to maintain that eighth of an inch or not eighth of an inch point one optimal load until it gets down to all the way through speed it up a little bit okay and now it's going to come in and do the first eighth of an inch of that pocket and it's going to do the eighth of an inch of this pocket so right now it's kind of ordered by depth so it's going to take each one of these then come back and do those you can make changes so that it cuts all of that pocket at once and then comes and cuts this pocket and then that pocket etc but we're not going to do that in this case so once it gets past a certain point here you'll notice i got a big red section here so i wanted to show you that show you what that looks like okay so you see that i've got red here let's see what's happening so let's hide these two actually let's not show our tool path and let's see what's happening so if we look at it this way the actual collet that's holding the end mill is now rubbing up against the top of our stock or not the top of our stock but the top of the model so that is only because we chose the preset bit from autodesk at the preset length so this length needs to be taller than the bottom of this pocket i don't actually care about having this error message in because i know that i'm going to be installing a bit that is longer than the depth but if you don't want to have this error message show up in your cam then you need to either create a custom tool that has the appropriate length of the bit or you go find another quarter inch flat end mill available in their library that has a longer bit or a different sized collet so that way you can get all the way down there again i know because i'm just doing this for simulation purposes i know that the bit i'm going to install in this is going to be longer than the depth so i'm not worried about that error message but in general it's good practice to not have any error messages or any stops or collisions is the correct term not have any collisions show up in your cam tool paths so let's go ahead and watch the rest of this again ignoring the red areas that it's accidentally rubbing up against let's just make sure our tool pathing is correct so it's cutting down let's go ahead and hide the tool there we go all right so we've now cut from the top down to this surface and then we cut down from here down to the bottom let's go ahead and hit close and what i'm going to go ahead and do now is now that i've got most of this milled out we're going to go ahead and cut the contour so let's go 2d contour and you don't have to select the bottom you can select the top we're just trying to give it the shape that we wanted to cut so i want it to cut this shape and i want it to cut outside this line i don't want it to cut everything inside the line and let's go and hit okay and see what it does so right now it's just cutting directly on top because we didn't give it any bottom surface so let's hit edit go to our heights tab and we say we want to cut that contour down to a selection and we can say the bottom of the model or the bottom of the stock now in this case because we haven't faced the other side we want to go ahead and cut to the bottom of the stock so let's go stock bottom it's going to put an eighth of an inch lower than the material hit okay and now it's just going to plunge that bit all the way down to the bottom and start cutting around that's a lot again a lot of cutter engagement so we don't want that so let's go and hit edit go back to our passes change it to multiple depths and let's do a sixteenth of an inch depth because we're going to be plunging all the way around and hit ok and see what it's doing now so now it's doing the same thing but it's doing it in 16th of an inch increments so let's go back to edit go back to our passes tab and actually let's not do our passes tab let's go back to our geometry tab and let's say we want to add tabs so probably most of you are familiar with tabs but essentially it leaves a little bit of stock at certain areas so that way once it's finished cutting your part doesn't randomly break free from the stock and start crashing into your bit and end up ruining your project this is really really important to use tabs in most cases unless you've really thought about how you're going to be holding on to your part when that part finally breaks free so let's go ahead and add some tabs and you can see that it's giving me some automatically generated ones and we can say okay how tall do we want the tabs to be well now because we're cutting down below it's not actually going to hold on actually it is going to hold on to our stock because our stock is actually sitting a little bit lower but let's go ahead and make our tab height a little bit higher so let's go 0.125 so you can see now that it's going to hold on up until the bottom of this but because we haven't faced off the bottom yet that means it's actually going to hold on just fine and i'll show you that in a second so now let's change our tab width so we can say 0.5 inches and we can also change how we position the tabs so if we just do it by distance that's going to be some automatically generated tabs and i can say well i want the tab distance to be three inches between every tab right or four inches and that's kind of an easy way to select how many tabs you want to have so the smaller it is the more tabs there's going to be so if i wanted a lot of tabs i could hold on to it but let's go ahead and make it two that seems like a pretty good amount hit ok and let's go ahead and simulate this so let's right click our contour and just simulate the contour for now now we're getting some more error messages again because the tool holder will rub up against this and as it's coming down let's make this transparent there we go speed that up a little bit show our tool but only show the flute okay it's cutting through and once it gets to that bottom section let's see we haven't started the tabs yet okay so now we've started cutting the tabs so it's going to raise up once it gets to here come up over down like that and leave a little bit of material and let's go take off transparency and we can see that yes we are still holding onto our stock so that's good so let's go and hit ok yes so you can see here that it is actually still holding onto the stock we haven't cut all the way through so that's good and so let's go ahead and simulate the whole thing actually first i'm going to go ahead and change the tool so that way we can simulate this properly without any error messages so let's go ahead and create a really quick quarter inch end mill that's a bit longer so we don't run into that error message so let's come up to our tool library right up here tool library and actually so in my library here i'm going to go and add a flat end mill and i want it to be 0.25 in diameter 2 flutes carbide end mill and i want the shaft we can leave that be for now overall length i want it to be two and a half inches the length below the holder will say we're going to hold on to a half inch of that bit so two inches and then shoulder length we can go ahead and make that zero so there's actually we can't so it must be larger than the flute length so let's do well let's do flute length of one inch and shoulder length of one inch hit okay again this is just really rough i'm only doing this for simulation purposes um i already know that i'm just going to install a long quarter inch end mill in there so let's go back and change our tool to be to be that tool so select from our library the quarter inch end mill that we just added now it changed my spindle speed so let's go 16 000 rpm cutting feed rate of 120 inches per minute okay we're back to normal hit ok come back edit this one same thing library this flat end mill 16 000 cutting feed rate of 120 everything's back to normal come back hit edit on this one same thing library flat end mill 16 120 inches a minute we still have the 40 inches per minute feed rate or not feed rate plunge rate i'm okay with that we have a fee 3000 feet per tooth it's a little aggressive we could probably change that but we're going to leave that for now okay so now let's go and run this simulation again and see if we get any error messages so it's going to cut through the top it's going to face it then it's going to clear out this area then it's going to start pocketing each one of those by depth we still have an error message at the end so let's take a look at that in a second so as it's coming down let's see our show our tool holder where are we getting these red yep so it's going to end up rubbing into that tool holder that's okay again i know that that will work but you may want to go in and add your own tool your own tools and your own tool holders to make sure you don't get those error messages and so the finished design let's go back to simulate real quick drag it to the end just give it a second so our finished design or cam program should have most of this cleared out with just some tabs remaining so that way all we have to do is then flip it over and now we don't care about the orientation because we've already cut all the major geometry flip it over face the top of the stock down to the thickness we want and then we could apply a radius or we could take it to the table router and go ahead and just round over those edges so this is essentially what you would end up taking off of your cnc breaking it free and applying those round overs so now that we've gotten through through the tray basically done let's go ahead and go back to our box and let's do the lid and we can power through this really quickly because it's going to be the same stuff it's going to open this up and let's go to manufacturer let's create a new setup and let's go ahead and make this say box point we want the box point to be here we want our x to be in this direction and our y here so let's go model orientation x y want our x to be here and our y to be here change our box point back to here y is pointing in the wrong direction so let's flip y now that's all oriented correctly let's go to our stock and let's say relative size and let's put a sixteenth of an inch on each side so top is point zero sixty five so we can face that off zero sixty five you can see down here it's telling me the height of the stock so actually if i wanted this to be 0.75 i would need to subtract 7.75 from there so 0.75 minus 0.71875 divided by 2 so i'd only be taking a 64th of an inch off of each side that's not actually going to work for me so i know that i need to cut this from thicker stock so we want actually a one inch stock so 1 minus 0.71875 divided by 2 that is going to be how much we take off of each side so let's go top offset point and point one there so our stock height is one inch stock perfect let's go ahead and side offset so how much on the sides do we want let's go ahead and apply a 0.5 inch so we need a 10 inch long by 6 inch wide by 1 inch high piece of walnut in this case hit okay and now i can go ahead and go face and let's go quarter inch flat yep we still have the same tool 16 000 inches per minute let's uh leave the cutting rate where it's at let's see our bottom height is going to be our material so let's do multiple depths of point zero sixty five inches hit okay and see what happens okay so our offset not our offset our step over is a little too large go back and hit edit passes our step over needs to be less than half of the bit typically so we're going to do 0.1 inches hit ok so it's doing it in three passes of point one inch step over okay and now let's go ahead and contour let's go ahead and contour this right here and then quarter inch flat yep 16 000 we can leave the cutting right there and we want this to go down to we could say the selected contours or just down to this surface and we want to do that in multiple passes 0.0625 okay now you may want to do it larger than that so sometimes it's pretty rough on your tools to be plunging all the time so what you can actually do is come back to passes and go multiple finishing passes and you can say 2 and let's say the step over be 0.1 let me show you what that does what that means is actually going to start wider out and do a pass on the outside and then also come back in and cut the inside and it's also leaving a little bit of stock so let's go back to edit hide this okay so it's not actually leaving any stock what we were seeing was that little chamfer so let's go stock to leave radial stock to leave so axial would be in z coming down this way radial would be coming in this way so let's leave a thirty second of an inch so point zero three one two five inches and zero zero axial hit okay and so now we aren't plunging the entire time we're actually cutting on only on one side of the bit at any given point and now what i can come in and do let's see okay that's also coming from the stock top so we need to change that as well so edit heights the top height isn't the stock top we want it to be the top of this machine section which we've already faced down so hit ok so it's only cutting it's not going to be cutting thin air it's only going to be cutting from the parts that have already been cut and now we just need to contour it so 2d contour all that's the same we want to cut this contour all the way down to this surface so selection down to here come back and let's add some tabs let's make sure we're still holding on to our part yes we are so we could probably just hit but let's do multiple depths of 0.0625 inches and hit ok and see what happens okay so let's simulate this real quick and see if we need to make any last-minute changes and then we'll call the video a wrap so it's going to face off the top there we can see it better that way it's going to face off the top in three passes until it finally reaches the top of the lid okay and then it's going to come around the perimeter and pre-cut that section leaving a little bit of stock for us to come back and trim and then it's going to go ahead and start cutting around the part to break it free it's going to go all the way down and it's going to leave some tabs for us so that way we can hold on to the part so if i close this come back into here simulate okay doesn't look like it's cutting all the way through so let's check that real quick so close contour yep it's not cutting all the way through for some reason so let's go back to our contour edit and let's check our heights so we're cutting down to that face but actually because our stock so let's go back to our stock because we still have some material here right it's not cutting down far enough so we actually need to cut it down to the stock so let's go back in edit contour heights come to the bottom height and change that to stock bottom hit okay now it should be cutting all the way through yes now it's cutting all the way through to the bottom until we finally break the part free and we can either plane down the other side or do another facing operation to trim it down to its final thickness and then put a round over on it so we've given ourselves our our completed model here where we can break it free and we've given ourselves our completed model here now there is one last thing we haven't done yet and i brought i saved this for last because sometimes if you need to get a very specific fit between two parts so for example this needs to fit inside this section right here now cnc machines they are very precise but sometimes you don't get exactly the fit you're looking for and you don't want to take it off the cnc before you've guaranteed that fit is the way you want so that's why we left a little bit of stock to leave on the lid so let's go back to this contour right here we left a little bit of stock to leave so we're going to do one more pass on here and we're going to go ahead and see if we can trim that up to final size and then do a test fit so instead of creating a new pocket or a new contour you can actually right click the one you just did and say create derived operation what this does is it keeps all the settings and selections and all of the heights and everything exactly the same as that operation but then you can change which operation it is so i'm going to go ahead and do another 2d contour with all the same settings so everything's already selected for me and the difference here is we are going to take off multiple depths because we've already removed most of it and stock to leave let's go ahead and hit zero actually we just uncheck stock to leave no finishing passes so we'll just uncheck that hit okay so let's go ahead and simulate this again oh that was really fast okay it's going to face it it's going to go ahead and do that cut all the way around the contour and then at the last thing it's going to come back and re-trim this to final size and then what we can do is grab if we've already cut out the tray we can now grab our tray while this lid is still on the cnc and see if it fits now if it's too tight then we can go ahead and change this create a new program and cut a little bit more off until it fits if it's too loose then you've already cut too much off so it's always better to leave a little bit of excess on the areas where you need a really good fit and then keep running that operation until you get the fit that you'd like so let's say for example we trimmed it to final size and it's still just a little bit tight so while this is still clamped down on the cnc we can come back into fusion open up this last contour come back to passes open up stock to leave and we can actually leave a negative stock to leave rather than a positive so we can actually cut too deep into it so we don't want to cut anything axially and we would just want to take off let's say an extra ten thou so i could go negative point zero one zero and know what that's going to do is now you can see that it's actually clipped off we can see our material sticking through the simulation so it's going to take an extra 10 thou off of that and then i can repost that program run it on my cnc again check my fit if it's still too tight i can take you know an extra couple thou off test again once i get the fit i like now i have a program that i can use for every one of these if i'm going to be making multiple at a time okay so we've done most of the programming the last thing we need to do in order to actually send this to our machine is we need to go ahead and export these as a gcode file so if you want to keep this last one separate you can select just the first three and make that one program so it'll do all of that without any tool changes or any stopping whatsoever if you'd like to run the entire thing all at once you can just select the setup and you can go post process now i know that i want to do these three first and leave this contour separate because i'm going to run that as a separate operation that i can keep changing and re-running in order to get the fit that i want so i'm going to right click post process and then in here i've saved i typically save my files to a dropbox which then i can pull up on my laptop over at my cnc and go and run the file there is some tricks here with post process so you'll need to make sure that you are post processing to the correct file for your cnc so in my case i am using a heavily modified x-carve that i still use their post-processor for this so i just go ahead and hit post and i can save the file with whatever name i need so let's go gift box hit ok once i hit ok it's going to pull up the g code file so now i have an opportunity here to make any last minute changes so i know typically that i don't want it to move in x y first i want it to move in z first so a lot of times for example i will then cut that out paste that first so that way before it does any xyz xy moves it's gonna move z up first to clear all of my stock move to the correct location and then it's gonna start doing its z down and start cutting you may not need to do that with your machines i know that's a particular constraint on my machine and so that's something that i would do in this space but otherwise you might be able to just close it out and call it a day so i know that was a lot and i know i moved a little bit quickly through that but i spent a lot of time explaining a lot of the features up front so that way we could move through the actual cam programming for the lid and the tray quite a bit quicker so this was a really cool project and you can see on screen here again what that looked like and i've been really happy with it and every one of my family members and my friends loved it as well and it was a really simple little program to create i was able to do the whole thing in about a day day and a half including linseed oil and sanding it all up so thank you so much for joining me today this is episode one of setting up cam in fusion 360. in the next episode we're going to be talking about order of operations and then the final one we're going to go ahead and create the cam for the guitar that we just made so thank you for joining me today if you like this video or the content i put on here please don't forget to like comment or subscribe for me it does help my channel a lot but otherwise i will see you in the next project

Channel: Austin Shaner

Views: 10,975

Keywords: Autodesk Fusion 360, CAD, CAD Modeling, CAM, CAM Basics, CNC, CNC Router, DIY, DIY Gift Box, EDC, Every day carry, Fusion 360, Fusion 360 Beginner, Fusion 360 CAM, Fusion 360 CAM Guitars, Fusion 360 CAM Tutorial, Fusion 360 Tutorials, Gift Box, Groomsman Gift Box, Guitars in Fusion 360, Kershaw Leek, Tutorials, Xcarve, fusion 360 tutorial

Id: VPMvnzmuTOw

Length: 70min 40sec (4240 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 13 2021