Improving Fusion 360 3D Toolpaths! FF115

Improving Toolpaths for 3D Surfacing in Fusion 360. We all want great surface finishes but TONS of factors (maybe even some things you don't normally consider) effect the end result. Understanding some fundamentals, tips, tricks and methodologies can help you tailor a solution to fit your needs. Let's do this!
Better Toolpaths Make Better Parts-with Rob Lockwood
bit.ly/2CjAUVE
Lakeshore Carbide Corner Radius End Mill: bit.ly/2p6312d
CAM Expressions on NYC CNC: bit.ly/2DfQ41L
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Reach us / CNC Info:
Speeds & Feeds: provencut.com
Download Fusion 360: www.dpbolvw.net/click-9255839...
Online Fusion 360 Training: bit.ly/LearnFusion360
Hands-On CNC Classes: www.nyccnc.com/events
SMW Products: saundersmachineworks.com/
CNC Resources: www.nyccnc.com 5 Reasons to Use a Fixture Plate on Your CNC Machine: bit.ly/3sNA4uH

[@MarcPilon]

The quality of your tutorial is now impressive for it's content and form. Evolution throughout the years was constant. It's almost art.

[@Eggsr2bcrushed]

Mold shop guy here. Never used fusion, rather PowerMill. PowerMill has a toolpath called steep & shallow which I really like. It is almost 2 toolpaths in one, a raster finishing (called parallel in other programs) and a constant z. You just define parameters for both toolpaths and then an angle in which you want to switch between them. An example is 45 degrees. If something is less than 45 degrees then you do a raster and if it is steeper, you do a constant z. Mostly only use that for a semi-finish because there is some blending left to do right where the 2 toolpaths meet. Normally semi to 10 grand away axial and radial. Finish with just an overnight raster with a ball mill. Surface finish honestly isn't everything. Unless you are going for a diamond buff (basically a mirror finish) there is a good enough point. Many molds get bead blasted or some other form of texturing as well.

[@Hirudin]

Eggsr2bcrushed Something similar can be done with Fusion 360, but I believe it has to be setup with two operations - the first goes from 0 to 45° (or whatever) and the second will go from ~45 to 90°. It also has the same problem at the transition point. I usually try to change the numbers around (like, maybe use 46 - 90° instead for the second op) to try to get consistent-ish spacing between thd two).

[@maikeydii]

When I worked in mold machining, we usually overlapped the raster and constant z (I think it was called waterline in program we used) by few degrees. Lets say raster from 0 to 30 degrees and waterline from 28 to 90 degrees. And we used bull nose cutters almost exclusively.

[@Hirudin]

Man, my hat's off to you. You packed a lot of good info into this video! I appreciate the editing work that went into it too - I know that colored/shaded imagery doesn't just appear out of nowhere and neither do the comparison shots, but they're very helpful and elucidating.

[@jimrummy1300]

Mate, over the years your tutorials and content has truly come alive. Thank you so much for putting in the effort you do. I love watching your regular content. Cheers!

[@dantahoua]

Love so much your videos! I'm a woodworker with a small DIY CNC, but I use Fusion 360 a lot and all your tips and tricks help me so much!! Thanks!

[@codylaursen2987]

Great stuff as always , John! I've probably watched 90% of all of your videos (and I mean the old stuff too) and never been disappointed with the content. Interesting enough, I am going to business school and have a CNC Taig in my closet! :)

[@samboles8796]

I really enjoy you’re videos John I learn so much from them really a lot of fun Thanks!

[@dklopp]

This is fantastic, not to mention very timely for me. Thanks for posting!

[@wernerberry7800]

Hey Buddy love the expression trick! Also great to know you have the info on the NYCCNC website! You are doing a great job with it. Thanks for sharing!

[@driftlessjoinery5059]

So much good stuff in here. Thanks John. I'm still teaching HSMWorks but learning Fusion for my home machine. Waiting for Solidworks to drop CAM in 2018 too. Ahhhh......your vids help.

[@Cinnabuns2009]

Also, if this in aluminum, with so little to cut left, you can do .075 mm (.003") per flute or .1 mm per flute feeds with a 3/8" endmill (max RPM) so as to speed up these ominously long toolpaths by increased speed. You could actually probably do more than that even but that's what we run in our shop to be on the safe side. RPM... high as you can go for getting down to the last pass. When you put your last mill in to finish, we've found that NOT running max rpm can be an asset for surface finish (we generally leave .008"/.2mm for the final finish pass) as in, if the machines max RPM is 10k... running 8k rpm will yield a better surface finish because the machine is not "balls out" on what it can do and the surface finish reflects that. Its not a huge difference so for production you want to run as fast as you can but in a job shop to leave a "job shop" type of finish, staying more inside the bounds of what the machines max is yields a far better product. Cheers.

[@makestuffwithkids989]

Some great tips in here. Keep up the great work!

[@jeffjaje5568]

A part like this could also be very good for performing a couple morph operations on the top faces and a contour/ramp on the steep sides. Are the sides extruded faces or do they have additional curvature?

[@Mirage5892]

Even though this video is a few years old, I find it very helpful. I've been having difficulties getting Fusion 360 to add a rounded boss on to an otherwise flat part. As it seems Fusion just seeks to ignore the base of the boss

[@3dkiwi920]

You Sir, are a god damn legend. Greetings and thank you from New Zealand!

[@occamssawzall3486]

Other options is to force single direction surfacing, climb or conventional mill only. You can often get better surface finishes if you conventional mill as the tool will deflect in the direction of the cut, whereas climb deflects 30-40 degrees tangent to the cut direction. Especially useful with small endmills taking off only a few thou for finishing. Other option is instead of using that bull endmill to leave .02 on. Use a semi-finish surfacing tool path and leave .02 on all surfaces. That will give you a near perfect .02 on all surfaces for the finish surfacing and not have any stair stepping at all.

[@bilalaker8417]

Is there any way you can give a link in future tutorials. .. so some of us can download the model and follow along to learn...

[@stevenguevara3252]

very good tips!

[@Heizenberg.]

Always learn something new. But, what software do you use to capture your PC screen?

[@MacMiskenn]

Props for conversion to metric!

[@kevinzorba7967]

Thanks so much for your clips and explanation on such metal working.... I need your advise on my parts how to make them! How can i contact you directly... please..

[@hornyj1]

Forget about Scallop when the tool path collapses at the top of your part to sharp corners like in the video. Use Flow tool path instead (has both modes 3-axis and 5-axis for those lucky enough having 4/5 axis machines)!

[@jeffjaje5568]

Those collapsing corners on Scallop are sometimes affectionately referred to as "snail tracks" by some moldmakers I know.

[@murrayedington]

Surely if you used the bull nose cutter for the finish, you'd avoid the problem of zero surface speed at the bottom of the radius that you get with a ball end mill? The only situation you couldn't use it is if you have a concave surface feature on the top (re-entrant in the Z direction) or an external radius that is greater than the cutter. But for this part which has neither it would work fine I'd have thought.

[@Sapper21b10]

I like that you advocate buying American for good quality material. Love you content keep up the good work

[@occamssawzall3486]

Chad Huston Because China lies horribly with their materials even if you get it certified, they just write a cert for whatever you want regardless of the actual material. We had a forging company over there forge us some aluminum parts. Supposed to be certified 7075. Half the parts came back a lighter shade of grey. Hardness tested em and sure enough, half were 7075 and the other half 6061. Even though both had certs saying they were 7075.

[@356B]

Powermill❤️

[@foxtrot1787]

Can anyone explain why if i face my stock and then pocket my part. the pocket operation still thinks there is stock there? so my stock is 6.45mm i face off -.45mm the pocket operation still pockets -2.45 when i only need it to pock -2mm.

[@daveanderson2316]

FoxyBingo just a thought but maybe hit the "rest machining" button. It looks at prior tool paths under your set up. Might help.

[@foxtrot1787]

Dave Anderson I had a look at that but it asks me for my tool diameter and doesn't have the same option as demonstrated in your video. I managed to resolve the issue. It was due to my lack of understanding of the "heights" option within the tool path settings.

[@ScottMoyse]

John. Some machine / control combos much prefer having a heap of lines versus arcs. And move smoother that way. So it's not a given that applying smoothing in the passes tab will result in smoother motion. In any case, for the majority of machines your are correct.

[@occamssawzall3486]

Scott Moyse That’s usually the high end machines that will automatically compensate tool path movements and adjust feed rates. Basically it’s controller side smoothing factors, but the control can do it better than CAM since it can compensate for linear accelerations based on the actual feedback from the axis motors. Usually requires a specific Modal G code to turn on and off as well. I’d say 90% of the time though it’s best to run the smoothing and arc filtering on the CAM side since most machines don’t have auto smoothing control side and it significantly decreases the amount of computing the CAM software has to do.

[@extraace]

May have missed if this is meant for the haas or tormach. Pathpilot(linuxcnc) does have in control path blending. You can turn it off, on, or set a tolerance(smoothing). Usually I leave it on with a .0005 tolerance. If it's something unimportant, I increase the smoothing above.0005 in cam.

[@ScottMoyse]

Occams Sawzall yeah... But to be fair I haven't seen a modern Haas with the HSM option data starve, or show any negative impact with the toolpath having smoothing disabled in the CAM. I've only seen it being an issue with older machines or machines without any form of look ahead option on the control. In any case this is very useful for a lot of people, I just wanted to point out that it shouldn't or doesn't have to be used all the time.

[@occamssawzall3486]

Scott Moyse Isn’t high speed machining look ahead still an optional add on for HAAS? Or is it finally standard.

[@ScottMoyse]

Occams Sawzall an option....

[@TommiHonkonen]

I dint know about these expressions. Being case sensitive makes them harder to use. Basickly have to have copy paste list on hand to use. Make non case sensitive!!

[@Somun-a]

I would not prefer typing all of those manually, compared to basically a few mouse clicks (assuming the document is open).

[@HardcoreMusik]

Don't understand why you not set the offset Z to zero in the first adaptive operation? So the second operation do nothing at the bottom...like you show here

[@Hirudin]

Captain DJ Setting the axial (Z) offset to 0 would/could make it basically face off the part with absolutely no stock left on the top. After all the finishing passes the flat surfaces from the facing might still be partially visible and the contrast between the facing cuts and the ball-mill cuts might be more noticable than desired.

[@HardcoreMusik]

Hirudin Ok, that's right. I was thinking the depth was set to a number over (Z-) the rest material...i must watch it again, I think I understand it wrong. My English is not the best :-)

[@HardcoreMusik]

Ok, im tested it. This variable is only an automatic help. I always use 1mm deeper cuts if there is enough material. So i want to set up this by myself.

[@bcbloc02]

I thought the easiest way was to 5 axis it and run the end mill on its side instead of the nose. :-)

[@occamssawzall3486]

bcbloc02 12-16deg lag in aluminum 6-8 deg lag in steels. 😁 If only SolidCAM easily accepted those emuge semi-circle barrel cutters I’d be so happy. Such a pain to get solidcam to recognize those tools though.

[@TommiHonkonen]

Good thing I run only 13 axis lathe with manual programming :P

[@makestuffwithkids989]

this sounds like a good rob lockwood challenge. machine it on the 5X micron :-)

[@Eggsr2bcrushed]

+Occams Sawzall What you are looking for is Hypermill! kzbin.info/www/bejne/eH7ZdJdubM-Zd9k Edit: Looks like Mastercam can use those Emuge endmills too: kzbin.info/www/bejne/haekcqhpZrd2Zqs

[@crozwayne]

Come on mate, Fusion is a bag of poo