Programming with a Right Angle Head

[NickB]

Hi Guys,

We recently purchased a right angle head for our mill that is equipped with the Acorn control board. The hope is that we will be using it quite a bit to drill holes into the side of our parts without having to change the setup. The parts are also far too large to be repositioned that it would be possible to drill conventionally.

Most of the time we will need to peck drill holes that are in a circular pattern (BHC). Instead of the depth being -Z, it would be +X. Is it possible to program this either using the CAM function or via manually programming?

I would love to avoid having to determine the Y and Z coordinates for each hole and only being able to drill to a depth without pecking. (However this is the only solution that I have currently that I know can function.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[suntravel]

If you want to use Intercon, you will have to setup a second configuration for the machine.

Pecking or other cycles will only work if you drill in Z direction.

Other option is to hand code with G0 and G1 or use a properly setup CAD/CAM.

Uwe

[cnckeith]

are you using a cad/cam system?
a cad/cam system can be setup so that it knows that you are using horizontal drilling and it will create the g code for you.

is the right angle head always installed? are you always using the machine as a horizontal?

[NickB]

We are not currently using a any cam system. We do use Inventor so perhaps we could look into Fusion. We are a small operation so most of the time the operator is the programmer and I was just hoping there was an easier and quicker solution that they could do. Besides this the rest of our programs are very basic.

The right angle head is not always installed as we frequently switch between drilling with the right angle to milling without the angle head. Therefore the machine is constantly being switched from being used vertically to horizontally.

[cnckeith]

right on thanks for the additional information.

a cad/cam system would ultimately be the best choice

if the types of drilling you are doing are similar you might consider writing a set of macros with variables, this is an old technique but works well for families of parts/operations that are similar. the g code program itself would prompt operator to enter the variable data such as depth,peck amount, feed etc.
https://www.centroidcnc.com/centroid_di ... amming.pdf

if it was a dedicated machine/operation with some variance in the cycles/parts, others have written their own App(s) to do just that.
such as this example. viewtopic.php?p=81732#p81732