I'm making a fixture plate that will have some ground precision .25" locating pins installed. I drilled them to a rough size smaller than the final size and am then using a CW drill MOP with a .1875 end mill to cut it to finish size. My CAM program has tool offsets so I can just enter the tool diameter and it creates the path. I'd like to 'sneak up' on the final hole size so I get a nice fit, not too loose, not too tight. To do this I've been going back to my CAM program and modifying the roughing clearance, starting with .003 and moving down a thou each time. This is a bit laborious as I have to generate the tool path and then the code each time. This is compounded by the fact that I intentionally don't use my Mach3 machine for anything else and it's not on my network so I'm 'thumb driving' the files back and forth. I'm guessing there is a more intelligent solution.
I noticed Mach3 has a tool diameter. Could it be as simple as putting in a tool diameter entry in Mach3 such as .1878 and then run it to get a .006 undersized hole, then enter .1877 and rerun the same program to clean it to .004 undersized....and continue decreasing the tool size until I get the fit I'm after? Is Mach3 smart enough to see that I coded a .1875 tool in the G code but have a .1878 in the tool info and it will then do the math?
Thanks,
Mark