I have a very simple design file where I want to spot peck drill 4 holes with a #112 bit. It’s actually about putting rubber feet on the bottom of a box.
All 4 holes are part of the same group and I selected that they be peck drilled. Because I am using a jig to hold the stock in place, and the zero height reference is at the bottom of the stock (and XY are offset).
I loaded the G-Code into Carbide Motion and loaded the #112 tool. Immediately the Z-axis rapid plunged the tool into what was luckly a pre-existing hole (that was there for irrelevent reasons) and the bit crashed on the shoulder rather than the tip.
I hit STOP and had a closer look at the preview, which looks like it wants to start from the base of stock and work upwards in the first hole.
If I do almost exactly the same thing but use a pocket operation, the dive to Z0 at line 15 is simply not there and the toolpath behaves. This is what I ended up doing.
My machine is off now, but it almost certainly will address it. I’ll check tomorrow.
However, because of the way my mounting jig is set up, putting the stock origin on top would mean that I would have to probe XY and then separately, Z.
It was easier to recast the problem as a pocket where it works correctly, and then fiddle with the parameters.
I’m still calling it a bug. I think it is trying to set an initial position “over the first hole” but it is forgetting to include the stock thickness in the initial Z position. (I have been a coder for around 40 years and that’s where I’d be looking.)
I set up the design parameters referencing the top of stock and regenerated the Drill toolpath.
The G-Code sets the initial Z at 1mm above the retract height (which was 4mm), moves to the XY start position, rapid plunges to 3mm, then to 0.25mm, then off we go.
I’m just poking this topic to keep it alive until I get a chance to check whether the new Carbide Create version has fixed the plunge to zero Z line (“Z0.0000”) in the GCode for a drilling toolpath with a bottom reference position.
