Is there any equivalent to an internal pocket for external cutting in intercon?

[apm]

I really like using the internal pocket tool and intercon. I tell it how to rough everything out, and leave say 0.025" to the walls. I'm running this on a 2D prototrak retrofit so I wind up being the z-axis cranking the knee up each time but that's no big deal. The program pauses and waits at crank the knee and I hit continue. It works great. Once the program finishes roughing everything out conventionally it then goes over and climb mills the rest of the way to the finished dimension. I really like it. Now I want to do the same thing except for on an internal surface I want to do it on an external surface. In other words run around a profile multiple times and then allow me to descend each time in a prefixed amount of distance for my rough and cuts and then finally when all done turn around come in another 0.025 in for the cleanup cut in a climb milling direction. I can't seem to figure out how to do that easily. Right now I've been using cutter comp and sending it all around, and then rerunning the program multiple times, to get it to stay the full 0.025 in away from the outside of the part I wind up telling it my end mill was a little larger in diameter, and then run another program for the finish cut. But this seems suboptimal there must be a better way.

Thanks

[tblough]

Look at the Cleanout cycle F9 under the Canned Cycle menu in Intercon. section 10.7.5 in the in the manual.

[apm]

I am finally getting back to trying to make this part after a little while. Now I'm playing with the clean out function on here. Unfortunately it looks like there's no way to do the DXF import in the middle of the clean out feature am I correct? Ideally I want to consider my part as an island and then clean out everything around said Island.

[apm]

For what it is worth here's the part I am trying to make.

My strategy would be to take a piece of 2" x 7" x 0.75" steel, bolt it down on the two holes, and then run my endmill all around the dxf profile but offset by say 0.020". Each time I would crank the knee up 0.075" so I am going around a full 10 times until I hit depth (I am doing this on a 2axis milling machine by the way) then once at depth, I want to climb mill the last 0.02" away to the final size. I really don't need a full external cleanout pass either but the internal pocket tool worked so well. It pretty much worked exactly as I wrote.

conrod.dxf

(263.23 KiB) Downloaded 7 times

I should mention that I did the last time I did a similar part used cutter comp and sent the cutter to the outside of the dxf. Of course I had to send the cutter comp all the way to a random point in space to get it started which I don't mind, then I ran the program several times over till I got all the way down. Additionally I created a fake tool that is 0.04" larger in diameter than the cutter that I want, send it one way, and then send the actual tool the other way but all of this felt quite hokey.

What I liked about the internal pocket was it imported the dxf directly, cleaned out the inside with a little clearance, than came around for a final pass. It worked great. Is there a precanned cycle to do this on the outside of a part or must I give it a fake cutter dia to comp to and program it in steps?

I am pretty green here but there has to be a better way of milling out a part as described above?

Thanks,

Adam

[apm]

This part is driving me nuts, there has to be a better way to handle this than I am currently doing

First off I tried to fake out the part by telling it I had a 0.475" dia cutter when in reality my endmill is 3/8" diameter. I figured I would send this all the way around the part at 0.475" and that would give me a nice offset. When done I would then change the cutter to a true 0.375" and clean up all the cutting around the part. Here's my code

Then I go to graph it. Since the inside radius are 0.1875" apparently rather than sending a sharp corner and just giving up on trying to hit the radius, intercon thinks it is a better idea to gouge into the part on both sides at the corners!!!

This is just getting frustrating. I can't believe that I am the first guy who wants to load up a DXF drawing mill around the whole outside to a depth and come back in and clean it up when done. I see no feedback here. Is this request possible with this software?

Am I on the correct path to try doing a cleanout cycle with an island in the middle? The 2 issues I have ran into so far is it seems like DXF import is disabled during the Island tool (I guess I can work around this, but it seems unfortunate) and the 2nd next issue is I really don't need to turn the whole box around it into chips. I just want to mill 0.05" or so outside of the part, and then come in for a final cleanup.

I guess maybe I am quite new to CNC machining but this seems pretty basic to me that I have to think there's a good way to do it or maybe not?

[cncsnw]

Try increasing the value you have in Parameter 99 to maybe 3 or 4.

[apm]

Try increasing the value you have in Parameter 99 to maybe 3 or 4.

I bumped the parameter 99 to four and that worked, to get rid of all those weird instances in the corners. Reading up on that parameter I see that I can set it all the way up to 99 and that it's the amount of lines that the cutter comp looks ahead to before comping. What is the downside of a large number and when would I want small one? Clearly a default value of one was a rather disappointing value to have in there.

[suntravel]

I always have 4 on my machines, this is working without problems.

Uwe