In projects that I have made, there will often be a set of tool paths that will be broken and random within the process which adds a ton of time to the cut. Example: I created a raised letter sign where you pocket all of the areas and it might cut for a little while in one area of the sign and then retract to move to the other side of the sign and make one plunge before retracting and moving back to where it was. The latest thing I had was creating a power cord protector ring for a console I was building and within the same pocket cut around a ring it made three passes. The first was uninterrupted and smooth, the second did the entire circle with plunge cuts and then the third was uninterrupted and smooth again. I have tried many things to resolve it but maybe I am missing something in my process of setting up the tool paths themselves. Is there a way to clean up that type of broken toolpath?
When making passes with the same bit the depth of cut is made on all the parts of the toolpath. The software behind CC is not optimized to an entire area and move over to another area. So there is a lot of wasted time moving. The only thing that can make the job run slightly faster is the retract height. Make the retract a small as possible to not waste time retracting and then plunging. Believe it or not CC has vastly improved over the last few years about not just jumping around all over the place.
If the pocket area is one spot there is not much you can do. If there are multiple pockets in the same toolpath then make each pocket a separate tool path and the entire toolpath is cut before moving to another toolpath. That may not be possible when hollowing out for a raised letter carve but if possible break it down into single tool paths for each feature.
I assume you are using CC, yes? Do you have the latest version? I know they have made some changes recently in the pocketing code that are supposed to help with this kind of problem.
I am using CC Pro v7 which, I agree, has a lot of added features and improvements. I have been impressed with how fast they have made so many additions to the software. However, I have still had many weird tool path hiccups on every version I have used. Just wondered if there was a trick or fix out there that I wasn’t privy to.
The only control is to select smaller regions/individual geometry and assign toolpaths to each separately.
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