I setup my physical tool position against the edges of the piece of wood I’m going to cut, as shown in the Tool Setup image (I do both x & Y like this), this means the center of the tool is setup half the diameter (offset) from the edge of the wood.
I assumed there was an easy way to compensate for this offset in Mach4 (or Fusion 360) but I have not been able to work it out.
My workaround is, with every drawing I do I in F360, I sketch lines offset ½ the tool diameter and setup on that intersecting point as shown in the Fusion Setup images, but this is obviously not the best way to go about it, but it’s the only way I’ve worked out. When I do this everything cuts fine.
I don’t want to have to play with the code that Fusion outputs to achieve my desirable outcome, I would have thought I could set up my physical tool as per the Tool Setup image, and then setup Fusion so the Origin is on the corner of the stock, and either Fusion, or Mach4 would compensate for the different diameter tools.
Eventually I found the Tool Offsets in the Mach4 Tool Table and thought my troubles were over, see Tool Table images to see what I setup.
Well was I wrong, when I ran some test code to Bore a hole, the code that came out of F360 looked ok, but when I tried to run it through Mach4, with F360 set for Tool 3, and Mach4 selecting Tool 3 from its Tool Table, things went haywire.
I didn’t notice the wacky toolpath that Mach4 created at first, but when I tried to actually do the cut, not only did it try to follow the wacko toolpath, but it made my Y axis motors trip out! This happened several times before I noticed the crazy tool path, see image Wacko toolpath 2 image.
When I reverted to Tool 6 which has no setup in the Mach4 Tool Table, the toolpath was fine, the cut was fine, and the motors where fine , see Tool 6 image.
Can anyone tell me how to sort this out?