Hi folks, I drew a pretty mundane circle and sent it to the Nomad Pro 883. I noticed the machine would retract and then plunge at the end of every pass and it seemed kind of awkward to me. The tool path I chose was “inside”.
Is this expected? Here’s a video of it: https://goo.gl/photos/P4ibPWtPu4vpeeU56
It does that.
Usually this sort of retraction is done to clear chips, but that’s not needed for larger pockets — mention it to support@carbide3d.com and hopefully it will be added as an optimization.
I do like that feature, especially since I do very small geometries.
However, I do agree that it is clunky and slow when just roughing things out, taking almost 1/4 of the total machine time. You can reduce the effect by calculating your retract distance to be closer to the part. mine retracts just 1mm above the work piece, and that speeds things up by quite a lot.
Took me a while to figure out that the default retract distance was way up in the air, and how to move it down (it’s not exactly obvious in meshcam)