Hey Brian, I am about to purchase the wizard set. I have found the free wizard is a little buggy.

Any how I am now confused. And probably missing something but i need to find a better way to prep stock. It is taking me longer to make my stock blocks than it does to cut a complicated 6 sided part.

Here is what I am doing now.  I know it is NOT the correct way but I don' t know a better way.

1. Using my miter box with a non Ferris cutting blade roughing the cube to +- .1 . This makes a pretty square -+ .02 or so block.

2. put it in the mill vice and and do a manual face with the jog keys to get a flat surface.

3. flip the part and do the same thing again.

4. jog the tool out of the way try to get in with calipers to measure the top of the stock to the bottom of the vice.

5. set the z dro to whatever is the measured value, mdi to the desired value and do another manual jog to face the final thickness.

6 Repeat this 2 more times for the other sides.  Yuck.

I only have a cheap 1.25 inch fly cutter that cuts like crap so i have been using a nice 3/4 roughing end mill for the surfacing.

So i was thinking about it tonight and it occurred to me that i could use a 2" gauge block to set the tool height.  This would give me an absolute reference height above the vice bottom, of witch the stock block is resting on. So i went to demo the surfacing wizard and entered 2" for the material surface and 1.85 for the depth. No deal. The wizard generated a preview that if i were able to post code to would surely have been the destruction of something.  I guess i don't understand why there is an option of entering a stock height. I would assume that this was always going to be 0. and the depth would be a -number.

I guess what i can't get my head around is what is your reference to the tool height, be it table top, mill vice bottom, parallels  or is it just whatever you are measuring.

I guess the way i would like it to work is:

1. Use a gauge block and set the tool height above the vice bottom, say 2"

2. now that I have an absolute reference above a surface go into the surfacing wizard and enter 2" for the stock height and 1.85 for the depth.  set the cut depth Etc..

3 Press cycle start.

4. Profit !

I know the danger with this is a goto 0. That could cause all kinds of catastrophe. But no more risky than using a machine that you aren't turning wheels on.

What am I not getting?

Plz Help!

Chad

BUMP

Brian, or anyone any words of wisdom?

thanks,

Chad

Chad,
where are you zeroing your Z axis?

Sorry I didn't see this one

Okay the first the Surface wizard that is free is about 20 years old and I never work on it The wizrad set from me is worked on all the time! If there is a bug I fix it becasue I want it to make your life a little better not harder...

Now as for the Stock height you are just about right! this is so you can cut from Z.2 to Z0.0 . This may not seem to be any realy big deal but think of it like this. If you have a chunk that is starting out at about 1" by 1" and you would like to have it .75 by .75 and Z0 to be the top of the part in the end when it is .75 . So you turn on the spindle take to tool down till it just cuts and type .25 into the Z axis DRO. Now you run the wizard with .25 as the stock height and cut it down to .125. Flip the part and cut from .125 to 0.0 and you are done

Hoe that helps
Brian

chuckels: Usually on the top of the part. See the rest of the post it might make more sense as to what I am getting at.

Brian thanks for the reply!

Ok I see what you are getting at. And it makes even more sense for 'your' wizards because you can chain them together, Surface- now at zero - drill , pocket.......

Here is where it is a pain in the butt for me. I am making a part that has six sides to machine. Six different xyz zero places (one on each side- upper right corner) because of this my stock has to be within a tho or two otherwise when I flip it what ever error is in the stock gets doubled and the previous operations don't line up.
I rough my stock to about 2x2x3.5 on the miter box. The box does a pretty good job of getting things close but there is always a little angle to the stock. Now if i measure on a low spot that will affect how much i am taking down, same with a high spot - both a relative number to the tool tip. My logic is, if i use a gauge block and set the tool tip in absolute to the (in this case to the bottom of the vice) I know exactally how high the block is going to be based on the bottom of the vice.
This is where I thought the wizard would allow me to enter stock height of 2" or so. could be a little more could be a little less, doesn't matter because i know that my tool is 2" above the vice. Now i need to take my stock to 1.9435 (what the cam is expecting) so i would enter 2 for the height and 1.970 for the depth. I can now flip the part and i don't have to measure anything. I can go to the surface wizard and and still have 2 for the stock height and enter my final depth of 1.9435 , hit start and Whola' I have the part exact. I only had to set one thing, and that was my absolute height above the bottom of the vice. I can now repeat this for the other sides and still don't have to measure anything if i want to do the 3.5 side i just enter 3.5 in the stock height and go from there. 

I have started doing it this way and is much faster and seems to give 'me' better results. The only problem is I still have to jog to do all the cutting using the jog keys by hand.

Btw i did purchase the wizards yesterday so far pretty cool. you will see the invoice as Richard (my partner).

I have been getting some vb script errors occaisonally and the wizards don't get along with mach blue light screen.

Not that you don't have anything else to do but how hard would it be to get a tweaked version of the surfacing wizard that works like my ass backwards workfllow? 

Thanks,

Chad 



 

Chad,
I'm not an expert by any means but it seems to me if you set your Z to zero with the gauge block you would know exactly how high the tool was above the vice bottom instead of off the rough cut stock.then you could set the depth of cuts from there and end up with the exact part size without measuring.
just a thought. these other guys will tell you the right way to do it but i am just fumbling thru as a hobby.
chuck

Yea that would work also, I guess i am just lazy and would like to work in absolute numbers in reference to the stock height. I guess if my final height is 1.85 i would like to be able to enter my final height without doing the math to get there from a arbitrary rough stock height. The other thing is this would eliminate the need to do a manual 'clean up' pass so i would have a place to take a measurement set things then work my way down..   It really isn't a big deal it is working and i am cutting. I am happy about that. I guess i am just looking for a way to make things quicker.


Chad

Chad,
if you use the gauge block your not doing the math from an arbitrary height and don't need to do a cleaning pass although the first depth from the 2" tool height might be a light pass depending on the original thickness of the stock.
the real issue is the wizard is in depth of cut rather than finished size. finished size would be great!!
chuck

if you need a finished height of 1.85 start with tool at the gauge height of 200 zero dro do the first finish at .075 deep flip the block and do another finish at depth of .075 more WA-LA tool is 1.85 above the vice bottom ( part height) it doesn't matter what the block started at.

any Gurus out there agree or disagree with the crap I've been spouting??