I'm finding the milling Wizards a great help, but would it be possible to make a few small changes,

 in the Keyway Wizard could the toolpath be "climb milling" ,  and in Rectangular Pocket on the final pass could "rounding" on and off be added, finally please please please  can a hole with a flat be added to the Electrical Shapes.

Many thanks,


Jim

Glad you like the wizards.

The keyway wizard must be the only one without a climb or conventional button. However, in the code there is a note that it does climb milling for the finish pass. Im not sure this works, but Ill have a look at it. Try setting an amount for finish and see if it climbs the finish.

I dont know what you mean about rounding in the rectangle. If you are cutting outside a rectangle the path always makes an arc around the corner, but the rectangle left will have a sharp corner. For inside cuts the tool must leave a round corner.

The electrical shapes wizard uses a file shapes.tap that should be in Mach3/Gcode. If you look at that file you will see it has each of the shapes defined in a standard format. Each shape starts with a (#). If you got the gcode for whatever shape you want and added it to that file with a unique segment number then the wizard will call it up just fine. You wont have an icon on the menu page for your shape, but if you remember its number simply enter that number in the Segment ID box  and it will generate the code.

Ill see about fixing the wizard to read all the ids in the shapes.tap file and displaying a list, then it could be a general purpose shape file

Hello Ron,

thanks for the reply,

I have just had a look at the Keyway Wizard and the finish pass is going round conventionally, if it could be changed I feel it would give a better finish to the sides.

On the rectangular Pocket if you look, the inside finish pass plunges down (in the Z axis) halfway along the long edge and then at the end reverses back up. Would it be possible to have a rounding on and off at this point, possibly with a very small overlap, so as to reduce any cutter "relaxing" and making a small groove in the face.

As for the Round hole with a flat, I've got a customer who loves these in his panels and being able to do them within your wizard screens along with the other shapes, produces a job as good as I ever could have using Heidenhain controls, ( my first CNC was a Bridgeport Interact that I bought new in 1985, spent a week looking at the manuals and then started putting all the manual jobs on it, that made money for a couple of years, until all the other subbies bought them that is). So if it could be added that would be great.

Jim.

The problem is I dont think there is a standard for how big the flat is. The way the shapes wizard works requires a piece of gcode for the exact shape, the wizard can scale and rotate it but cannot alter the basic geometry. If you have one standard shape send me the details, Ill see if I can add it to the list.

As you say there a many different sizes to do, could you do a seperate wizard, outside the electrical shapes section,  where you could input the hole size and the distance from the centre line?.

Such a wizard is possible, but in my view wizards are for standard, common jobs. If you try to do one for every shape it soon gets overwhelming. Try adding the shape to the shapes.tap file, that shouldnt be to hard to do. Or send me the specs for one common shape, Ill do the gcode and write it up here to show how its added to the shapes file

Good idea, as I do them I will add them to your shapes.tap file.

Also please could you clear up a tool path question, in mach mill are we looking down on the job to decide if the pathe is CW or CCW or looking up from below?.

I thin it always assumes we are above the work, looking down.