So I am working on a project where I need to cut a recessed hole over a through hole. The through hole is 5/16th in diameter and stock depth .220". The recessed hole needs to be .750" in diameter and needs to be half the thickness of the stock .110". The material is Acrylic and I am using an Amana 51410 1/8" single flute cutting tool.
I have edited the feeds and speeds for this tool to work based on Amanas recommendations. Speed is 30mm/sec (109 IPM), Plunge rate of 10mm/sec (24 IPM) and a cutting depth of .0625". I did not change the stepover as I have chosen an 1/8" cutting tool within Carbides tool list which is 0.118".
I have a given value of .3750" in the radius value parameter. I have selected a pocket hole to be cut with an inside left path to preserve the actual dim. The result is a hole that measures .500" What gives? I thought of changing the path to a no offset or an outside right but that apparently is not an option in this version build nor would it really fix my problem.
I’m running the latest release build of 530 for CC and CM any insights to what I’m doing wrong would be greatly appreciated!
Pretty sure! I need a .750" diameter recess after the operation, so a .3750" value is what I have entered into the parameter window.
Thing is I somehow have fixed my issue but I have no idea how I did it which is very frustrating!
The only thing I can think of is I changed the stock size to better fit the part dims, reverified all tool paths. I made another test article and everything came out like it should. I think I had the Y axis too small and it was changing the tool paths to fit? not sure.
Here is the edited file that did cut the correct dims.
I did not look at your file but I would recommend you make the recess first, then the through hole starting at the depth of the recess. This keeps you from cutting the through hole during the recess tool path. Since you have it working after reworking the tool path it was likely a mistake along the way.
It looks like most of your tool paths are all the same and just repeated over and over. If that is the case, it may make troubleshooting a lot easier if you select more than one circle as you create the tool path. So if you hold down shift and select each of the larger circles and then create the tool path you would have one tool path that you could call large recess or something and then click of the piece somewhere to deselect everything and hold down shift and then click on each of the smaller circles and name that through holes or something. Now you have two tool paths for those circles. Cutting down from 20 tool paths to 2 makes it a lot easier to troubleshoot these kinds of issues. Learning how to use tool path groups and multiselect to create tool paths had made my life so much easier.
For example look at the tool path grouping I have used for creating a cribbage board.
I have all the holes grouped depending on the stage of the cut and then if I need to I can disable a group and then only cut out the jig holes or the blank for example.
Thanks for the tips guys! I will revisit the tool paths and see about regrouping them based on size and depth! As to cutting it did come out satisfactory so the piece will work! I will post up a pic with the completed project when it’s finished!