MPCNC - Fusion 360 CAM & Workflow - Cutting 2D Parts Out of Flat Sheet

welcome back to another beginner's guide to the NPC and see so in this video I'm gonna be going through my fusion 360 workflow how I take a CAD model and turn it into g code how i cut parts out of flat stock so in this example here I've got a quadcopter frame that I modeled in fusion 360 and I want to cut the bottom plate here out of a sheet of metal this works whether you're cutting a sheet of plastic ishita plywood the process will be the same here what might vary are your feeds and speeds okay so in this case I have multiple components multiple bodies here all's I want to do is cut the bottom so I'm gonna select the bottom here right click it and press isolate and that will declutter my model to only show the part that I want once I've done that I can move from the design environment into the manufacturer environment and create a new setup I've already cut out some other parts of this so I have some old setups here which is why you see this other set up selected what we're gonna do is we're gonna click setup create a new setup and something I always do is ID select the model here and then I click on the model again to make sure that I know Fusion is referencing this 3d model for my stock in front of my operations for this setup now in this case I want my X to be to the right here my Y to be to the back and Z up when I look at my work coordinate system it's not set up that way so instead of doing the model orientation here I'm gonna select this option to pick my X and y axis so under x-axis here I'm gonna select a vertex that's oriented in the X direction under Y I'll select one that's already entered in Y and then I'll look at this thing here and see if it looks correct so it's upside-down because the Y is coming towards me so all I need to do is to click this box here that says flip Y axis and now that looks like it's appropriate oriented to what I want I can go to my stock point and I'll select this front left upper corner for my stock point and then I'll move on to defining my stock so you can define this as a relative size box I like to use a fixed size box and since I know I'm cutting this out a large sheet that is approximately 12 inches by 12 inches I'll throw in 300 by 300 here and see yeah this is a big sheet and I've just got a small model that I'm cutting out the height of my stock is actually one point six millimeters which is the exact height that I modeled my quadcopter bottom has as well so I'll put that in now I don't want to define my x and y in the bottom left corner of my stock and then have my machine go cut this part right out of the center that's super inefficient instead what I'll do is I'll define that my model is offset from the left by five millimeters and offset by the from the front by five millimeters now I know wherever I set my X&Y it's going to cut the model out right in that corner all right now I don't even have to define my stock that big either I can say that it's 150 by 120 or something like that and I can shrink this down the important thing here is that fusion knows that my model is surrounded by material okay because if I tell it that my material is smaller and there actually is material there Fusion might not recognize that there's supposed to be stock there and do an operation through what it thinks is empty space and is actually a chunk of metal so in this case if I set it up like this I can actually take my sheet that might be much bigger than that and I can define my X Y Z 0 in different points and cut out multiple copies at the same thing just moving my 0 0 each time so that looks pretty good for that everything looks set up and let's press ok and now we have a new set up so taking a look at our model here we have to come up with a plan for what tool pads and operations we're gonna run in order to get this done so I have a bunch of holes so I know that I like to use a bore operation to bore out holes what a bore does is it'll do a helix kind of circular entry and spiral its way down while cutting out the whole time I've got some big holes here in the center I could contour those out I could bore them now I can do some adaptive operations I'm probably have to do an adaptive on this one and then I'm gonna do a contour to cut out the whole thing here at the end I'm also gonna have to do a contour on these weird kind of oval-shaped motor mounting points here so let's start off with the bore cuz that's the easiest go to 2d press bore I'm gonna select the tool in this case those are pretty small so I have a tool that I've already built here that is a 3/32 single flew and mil that's set up for aluminum cutting already if you don't have any tools here then what you're gonna want to select is local library and press this new tool button here and define your tool so you have to get all the cutting dimensions and stuff from the site that you bought it from or from the manufacturer or if you don't have any of those just use a pair of calipers and measure and type all that stuff in you can also put in feeds and speeds here and the fusion 360 software will default to those when you load that tool in so in this case I'll load up my aluminum cutting tool and it already loaded in my default settings here so I'm actually going to speed up my spindle a little bit but keep my cutting feed the same what that does is reduces my feed per tooth to about just under one foul for tooth and that seems to be working for me on this pretty hard 7075 aluminum then I'm gonna go to geometry and it says select circular faces okay so I'm gonna cut out that hole there and since I have this checkbox already selected select same diameter it's gonna find every hole of that diameter and say yep I'm gonna cut out all of those for you I also want to cut out these holes so there's four more and let's just have it bore out that Center one as well I could also select these but as we can see I have defined a spiral pattern here based on an angle so that angle starts to become a little bit tricky when I get to really large holes like this here so we could also change it to a pitch and I think that will solve a lot of that problem that we have that looks probably pretty good yeah some point one five on the pitch and I'm just kind of eyeball on this some of these things you'll have to experiment with and see it looks like it's going in pretty gently not cutting too much material at a time probably point two yeah I think that'll work point two cool so now it's gonna cut out all of those holes for us just using this one boring operation and it's automatically gonna link in between all of these things for us here so let's take a look at our Heights tab and fusion uses these Heights for different things the first one I always look at is the bottom height okay so what is the bottom of this job it's the bottom of the hole that I selected okay good that's what I want the bottom of the hole in this case is the bottom of my stock so yeah that's where I want to stop cutting out the top of the hole right here the top height is the whole top well that's good in an ideal world where my stock is perfectly flat my machine is perfectly flat I did a perfect job zeroing it but that's probably not really gonna be the case so I'm gonna add a half a mil to this and just have it cut a little bit of air on its way in to make sure it does a nice clean cup and it finally gets into there so that looks pretty good and my retracting clearance Heights here I just want to make sure that those are gonna be above any screws or fasteners or anything that I have mounted onto my flat stock in my case I'm gonna be holding this part down with some heavy-duty double-sided tape so I don't need to worry about anything here on the top and three millimeters will be enough clearance for me then underpasses we already set our pitch we got set to climb cutting and that should be good I don't think we need any finishing passes or anything like that now I'm gonna actually put in a small negative stock to leave value on this one just because I know my machine and I've done this a few times and I think that negative point zero to five millimeter will which is about a foul will get me a nice accurate hole of the actual size that I want to have cut out then here under linking I always select preserve axial rapid and that's because I'm running a Rambo control board that has Marlin Marlin ignores rapid commands so when I tell Fusion to do rapid movements a g0 output it will actually ignore those cheese zeros and it'll use the Marlin firmware to find speeds instead which is what I wanted to do for my z-axis and for my X and y-axis it'll use this number that I put in so this says when it retracts it'll use the firmware to find slow retracts speed and then it'll zip in between these operations here at 3,000 millimeters a minute which is nice and quicken so then we'll press ok and I always like to simulate each tool path each tool operation each time I do it so to do that in fusion it's very easy you press the simulate button and then you can press play I like to make sure that the stock is turned on I like to turn off the tool path because it's just too much clutter as you get further into there but for this one we can look at it and then I'll look at the the flute and have it on transparent the default is this and it's just a lot of stuff in your way so you can get that all set up and then press play and watch it cut what you're looking for here is just to make sure that it looks like it's cutting you know at a reasonable speed that it's not taking like huge chunks out of this it all depends on the material you're using since this is gonna be aluminum I want to be pretty shallow if you were using wood you want to make sure it's not going too deep and jamming up your machine soft plastic you could probably go pretty fast again it all just depends on the material there so one thing I can already see a little bit of a problem here so this is what it did as a lead out you can kind of see this little green radius where to finish the bore and then moved in and moved up and it kind of crashed into this extra stock here I'm actually gonna leave that in only because this stock at this point is not actually attached to anything it's just held on by my double sided tape so it'll have a little bit of give to it and it's not gonna break the tool or anything that's just going to nudge that and it should be a problem he might even actually take that and launch it across the room so be careful for that kind of thing but you can turn off that under the linking tab here in the bore so I'm gonna pause this and press the fast-forward arrow here I'm going to turn off the tool path and I'm gonna turn off the model and just make sure that this looks reasonable for what I expect cool again if you want to turn off that lead out there you can go into the linking tab and you can adjust all these linking parameters here for the vertical radius the length and all that kind of stuff alright so I cut out all those small holes in the big hole next I'm gonna do a 2d contour on these contours here so I'm gonna select all of them and make sure that this red arrow is on the inside the red arrow is the side that fusion is gonna do the work on so if I select it here it's gonna cut this but it's gonna cut from the outside right I want the tool to be in the middle here because that makes sense Fusion is a pretty good job of guessing where you want it to be for a contour but you definitely pay attention to that and always do a simulation and make sure that it did the right thing so we've got a few of these to select all right then on a tool I saw my same tool my same speeds and feeds were already set and those will carry over from my last operation I did that's my geometry tab we selected the contours I don't need any the other op any of these other options I'll check my Heights again we're gonna cut from the bottom is gonna be the selected contour which is at the bottom of the model that's good the top height is gonna be the stock top and it's gonna feed from three millimeters up and that's actually gonna be a little bit too high I'll change that to one millimeter and I'll show you what that looks like when we're done in the clearance and retractor at three all right now four passes again I'm gonna do a slightly negative radial stock to leave just to make sure that I cut enough of this out axial stock to leave is how deep you want it to go so if your machine is not cutting your parts out fully you can actually do a little bit of a negative value here like 0.1 or point zero five and that'll make sure that it cuts a little too a little deeper to get the to get the part cut fully out so I have it set for climb milling I like to do repeat finishing pass as well that helps compensate for any tool deflection to give you a better dimensional accuracy and that looks pretty good I'm not gonna do multiple depths on this one I'm actually gonna do a ramp instead so when you're linking here I have ramp selected at 3 degrees and I'll show you what that looks like again we have preserve axial rapid 3000 and if I don't wanna keep changing that I can actually right click on that and press and make all default and that should carry across through all of my 2d contours here in fusion safe distance lift tight I like to make that just a little bit above 0 so that it'll actually pick the tool up and not drag it across the material and lead in lead outs are all the same looks good so let's press ok and see what that looks like all right so I can see it's doing this little contour ramp on its way in and I got an error here lead-out is dropped due to Lincoln constraint all right so it's not gonna do the lead out because it's gonna crash into the part I think so that's fine I don't need to worry about that so let's simulate now when I simulate I can simulate use a whole setup or I can simulate just this contour I'll simulate the whole setup but I'll actually press go to next operation and skip the first one and just watch this next operation so we'll watch our part comes in there's just kind of go back and forth around that little thing just zip it on through there and cutting them out looks good very tight squeeze those are only two and a half millimeters I think and the tool is 2.38 so not a lot of buffer all right cool that's forward turn off the model looks great all right so next I need to cut out this thing right here as well so I could do an adaptive operation and mill away all of this material which will just generate a lot of mass and stuff but in this case I'm just gonna cut it out with the contour it's all gonna be double-sided tape down so I'll just leave a little plug basically here in the middle that's the shape of this thing I think that'll be the least amount of work on the tool and still get us a good finish so I'll select 2d contour and I'll select that contour make sure my red arrow is on the side that I want to be we've got our tool selected here with the same feeds and speeds we'll select our heights and those are all set feeding from one millimeter now for passes we can do multiple depths if I want this to go like let's say a quarter of a mil and a quarter of a mil and just kind of keep working its way down I'm actually just gonna do a ramp instead and I'm gonna make it very shallow so it's gonna be kind of like a boring operation but I'm not a non circular shape I think that'll just keep the tool engaged the same amount the whole way that it goes down and should cut this out and make it look pretty good keep my negative radial stock to leave I'm gonna do a repeat finishing pass so we'll do the repeat finishing pass that'll make it nice and clean and then over here on linking we need to figure out the ramp angle so I'm gonna start with like one degree and we're gonna see what that looks like all right so that looks a little bit aggressive it's giving me an error for lifting plane yeah that's fine so let's take that down to half a degree maybe and try it again maybe still a little aggressive for what I'm doing in this aluminum so I'm just kind of guessing and checking here as I work down and yeah that'll probably work let's just go a little bit smaller just to be safe to to little tool engagement just kind of wears down your bits faster but I'll probably crash this bit into something and break it long before it wears out so I'm not really worried about that all right so that looks pretty good let's simulate again just skip the first two turn off the model and watch this move in let's just fast forward until it's gonna hit yeah so it's just kind of ramping the whole way down a little bit of engagement there and it'll cut this whole thing out looks great again I did this little linking lead out but in this case I'm okay with it all right so I liked that and I want to do that one again but I want to cut out the whole thing on the outside here so what I can do is I can actually duplicate this job and then just select a different contour so I'll take this contour chain and close it out and I'll select the outside contour that's okay all my settings should be exactly the same now this thing is so wide that this ramp is not actually gonna work that's not going to be a really effective strategy for this one so I'm gonna turn the ramp on to three degrees but I'm actually going to do multiple passes here under multiple dips so I'm gonna say multiple depths 0.45 millimeter and I'll tell it to use even step downs and see what that looks like cool so we can see we've got four different cutting depths here and it's ramping which means that it's going to kind of slowly work its way into the material instead of just plunging right in so again we will simulate and watch this last operation go so it ramps into it they're starting out shallow and then going to the full depth and it's just gonna cut out the whole part now this works well cutting out the whole part like this because I'm gonna have this whole thing taped down so once it's done cutting the part is still stuck to the bed because there's gonna be double sided tape all underneath of it here but if you're using clamps or screwing a piece of plywood to your machine or something like that you do not want to cut it all the way out like this because as soon as it gets about halfway done the parts gonna start to get loose and it's gonna probably ruin your part so instead what you're gonna want to do is you're gonna want to edit this contour and add tabs to your contour so you do that under the geometry tab of a contour you click the tabs checkmark and it will put tabs on here to keep this part attached and you can mess with them you can make them wide you can make them narrow you can make thinner or thicker and adjust the spacing however you like basically the more tabs there are the more secure the part will be with the more work that's gonna be to clean it up when you're done I don't really like having tabs on round parts like this just because it is harder to make them I'm cleaned up so you can actually just do it at points instead of out of spacing and I can put one there put one there something like that maybe I want ones on either side of this and I'm just gonna press ok and show you what that looks like in the simulation even though I'm not actually gonna use tabs so it'll run through let's turn off our model as well and make sure it looks correct and then as it gets down here it's going to start skipping over those tabs and you'll see that those are still connected so when we're done our part will still be attached to the main part of the stock that is clamped down or screwed down to our spoil board and all I need to do is pop that out cut those off sand them down and make it look smooth or whatever you need to do to finish off your part so that's it that's how you can use fusion 360 to cut out apart from flat sheet using some contour and some boring operations if you are using flat sheet I recommend doing the contours like this you can do adaptive 's and kind of cut all of this material but it's gonna make a big mess and might not be necessary if you don't use double-sided tape or something like that and you want to cut this out kind of the way that I've cut it out here where we have like this little island in the middle here I would also add tabs to these as well so the border cuts all the material you might want to use a contour instead of a board for these interior ones that way you can add tabs but if you're just clamping your material and you don't put tabs on here these things will get loose and they may or may not stay there they might fly around they might crash into the bit and cause some problems with your work so just some other things to consider I hope that video helped and take care

Channel: Apocalyptic Squirrels

Views: 13,243

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Id: VftazY1AHgo

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 27 2020