How to change cutter with Mach3 - CNCnutz Episode 199

there's gonna be some changes around here hello for life C&C nuts and welcome I trust you all had a Merry Christmas and that 2018 will be an even better year than last year this episode's inspired from an email that i received from bill he writes Peter how do I do a tool change in Mac 3 well that one little sentence may sound simple but unless you know what with three main ingredients of doing a tool changer that may not be the case first you have to create a file that requests a tool change next you have to setup Mac 3 + or whatever other control software you're using to actually respond to a tool change command and thirdly you actually have to do the tool change so I'm going through these pieces one to time and show you how that's done so for the purposes of this project I'm going to do a simple shape I have a circle and a square and I'm going to assign different tools to cut each of these out first one I'm going to do the circle I'm going to profile the circle now for that I'm going to use a 90 degree V bit cutter 12 millimeters in diameter and I'm going to cut it to 6 millimeters deep I'm gonna call this here circle and I'm gonna cut it on the line so if we do a quick preview of it we can see what it does next I'm gonna go back to the square and I'm going to do another profile so I'll select profile I'm going to select a different cutter in this case a 1/4 inch or six point three five millimeter cutter we're gonna do this around the outside of it I'm going to do just cut it again six millimeters deep and just for the purposes of this because I'm not actually gonna cut it I'll just sable cut that six millimeters on a single pass I'm going to call this square and we'll just calculate that now we'll give that a quick preview we can see the cap that that will make around it so now we're gonna look at saving our file let's close the preview and come here to save tool path I'm going to select both the circle and the square I can do that either by selecting these individually like so or I can just go to list here and they'll select all of them now let's come up with a tool path era circle and square both use tool number one but the geometry of Tong's are different and that's 100% correct come down here we'll see with our circle uses a 90-degree Vivat and the square uses a end mil quarter-inch so our tools must have a different tool number so I'm just simply kind of come down here to the square open this again going to eat it here and give it a different tool number calculate close that this time when I go to save tools and select the there is tool paths I've where you mate it's a lot happier there's no arrow coming up here it's showing one 90 degree V but and my quarter inch end mill now I've selected up here output all visible tool paths to one file and that's important that you select they're also important is the post processing you select and this particular instant I'm using Mac 380 C axe and millimeters now of course I'm using a metric post processing because I've set my machine up a symmetric I'm using axe but here's the important that the ATC the automatic tool change and that will force it to add commands and to change the tool it doesn't matter that you don't have an automatic tool change built into your machine but you this is the post process that you want to select for outputting your g code for mac 3 just go save tool pass the file and now I'm going to select my drive and the might case a USB stick and i'm going to come down here to tool change demo which is the one i've set up I'll just save that and overwrite the original one ok with that done we can take it out to the machine and give it a test so I've uploaded our file into Mac 3 and if we have a quick look down it we can see some interesting information amongst them it shows us our two two paths one labeled circle and one labeled where it also shows us what our tools are - one is a 90 degree V but and tall two is and inner mill if we go down a little bit further we come here to line number one for O and it says - 1 mo6 so an m6 says to do a tool change and T 1 refers to tall one and if you can't remember what the tool is simply have a look at the line directly below it which will tell you they did say 90 degree V but once it's gone through and cut that we come down here to line 290 and it says tool 2 m6 which means change the tool to tool number 2 and just in case we need reminding it's a quarter inch in more so let's go up here and run the file so when we started the first thing I should do is to actually come up to our first tool change and stop and request a change of tool which it hasn't done it's cutting our circle as you can see off on the side here and then once it's completed that Circle it again should stop request a tool change and when we've done that it should cut the square and quite plainly it's not doing that so I'm gonna stop there rewind the file and we'll figure out why that is come up here to config and down here to general config and here's the problem here tall change ignore tall change if you don't set that to either stop spindle and wait for cycle start or automatic tool changer it will ignore those tool changes now we need use stop spindle wait for cycle start we don't have an automatic tool changer a very few hobbyists do so this is the one you need to select just go okay and don't forget to come under config and save settings let's run this file again we'll just rewind it and go cycle start now we come down here it says to one mo six tour change and down here Mac three is looking at and says under the tool change your tour information here's is flashing change tool and it's telling us we need to number one again by referring to the g-code we can tell what toilet is we need to put in there once we set that tall and usually we don't need to worry about that first tool change because we've already set the tongue height as we want when we originally set up the cutter for the start so let's just go cycle start it now steps over and we'll start cutting out our circle now as it ends the nears the end of the circle cut it will again encounter another tool change command and Mac 3 will stop you can see here in t2 m6 so and we look over here under tall information that's telling us we need to change our tool and we need to be using tool number 2 and again it says over here if we look at the g-code that tool number 2 is a quarter inch or six point three five millimeter in the middle so we can now change that cutter and once we've done that we can hit cycle start again it'll now complete the cut for us so now that we've got our file created and Mac three is all set up ready to interpret those tool change instructions it's time to put it all together and make a cut so I've marked here a spot in the center of my material and I make that the origin point I've set up my cutter to be right on that spot and called that x and y zero and I brought the cutter down to the surface of material and made that my Z zero point so far no different from what you would normally do it study a cut well no real surprise there the spindle started up it cut our circle and then when it encountered that next tool change instruction it's stopped if you're not using a spindle like this here which is automatically controlled the cattle will simply sit there spinning waiting for you to turn the router off and change the tool manually so we now need to put in this quarter inch cutter and then we continue on without cut now the great thing is when it comes to this whole change you can lift the car up and you can jog around as well it's not a problem you won't lose position so I'm just gonna quickly move that put in the quarter inch cutter and tighten it into the collet having changed the cutter of course it's length is different from the previous one so that means I actually need to rezero it as well so what I'm going to do is take this cut it down to the surface of the material and reset my zero with the Catherine L zero to the surface of the material there I can now lift the cutter up and put a bat roughly where it came from it doesn't matter where I put it because when I push the cycle start key here either on my pendant or on Mac three it'll continue from where it left off so let's get this cut going then we have a down circle inside ask we're not quite sure what I'm gonna do with it so there you go changing from one color to another pretty simple now there's one more scenario that I haven't covered undoubtedly you've heard me banging on about setting my cutters to the top of my spoil board when doing profile cuts that cut right through the material as to save the spoil board now sometimes I want to set my cutter to the surface of the material as I did in the previous cat and sometimes I want to set it referenced to the table surface now if I'm using the same cutter all I have to do is give the tool path that cuts through the material down to my tabletop a different tool number when it comes time to do that cut make three walls stop request at all change at which time I simply re0 my is in position for the cutter and continue cutting it's a great way of allowing you to change we use the arrow or cutter without actually having to change the cutter so that's one of the trick I do use when machining and I use it quite a lot while they've about wraps it up for this episode a big thanks goes out to Bill first question on how to change cutters in Mac 3 hopefully it's helped not only bill but others as well in the meantime thanks for watching don't forget to like to subscribe and check out my website wwsz nuts comm as always you'll find a link to it under this video so until the next time Cheers you

Channel: CNCnutz (Peter Passuello)

Views: 23,924

Keywords: cncnutz, cnc, How to change Cutter with Mach3, Setup Mach3, how to setup mach3 tool change

Id: QYAU27ddXjg

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018