Good day.
Will adaptive toolpaths work well with our machines on Aluminium?
I sometimes need to make some weird stuff and Vcarve seems to be a bit difficult to get some things done…for example the attached item in the pic I modeled in 3d …but when the time came to cut it( 2sided )I had to redraw in 2d in Vcarve and cut the bowl cut with the moulding toolpath. but it is not that accurate.
So my question is would it be better to try with adaptive toolpaths?
Fusion360? any other software?
Deskproto comes to mind but no adaptive toolpath yet.
Another crazy idea to add a plate to my rotary to machine different sides of an item…is vcarve able to do this?..I got this idea from Avid rotary video machining the bow…I am guessing fusion360 was used for that?
I don’t think there is a way to do that completely with Vcarve.
You would have to create 4 different toolpaths by either using 4 different sets of 2D vectors, or 4 different faces of a 3D model, and then manually insert the 90 degree rotation of the A axis between each toolpath. This isn’t hard to do, but I wouldn’t call it “supported” in Vecric since it takes a bit of Gcode intervention to pull it off.
@Eric…that is some nice stuff!
Question what hp is the spindle? what bits where used…I had allot of issues in the beginning and now I only use o-flute bits. the problem I have with Fusion is you need to be online if I am not mistaken.
@Jim …It seems to me it would be better to get Deskproto for that function…I do not want to mess with Gcode.
Here’s a screenshot of the feeds and speeds I used. I wouldn’t take these as gospel, but they did work.
The key things are:
-Don’t be afraid to get the bit in the material. You can see that helix entry is conservative, but the point is that it gets you deep in the material right away.
-Once in the material keep that bit fed! I did that at at full (.25" depth in one pass) You want some nice chips to be created, and you want the bit to be fed material at a consistent rate. This is where that adaptive clearing in Fusion really shines: It does an excellent job at keeping the bit loaded with material, but preventing it from gouging in or getting spikes in the amount of material it’s fed.
-Keep it cool! I run an alcohol mister, it does wonders for keeping things lubricated and cool. The alcohol evaporates so it doesn’t wreck your wood surfaces if you’re machining on top of them.
These machines (especially a Benchtop Pro) can make chips fast!
I had never heard of that. I just looked and the price isn’t bad for hobby if it works well. I have wanted to do true 4 axis machining for 3D stuff, but Vectric doesn’t support that, and F360 gets kinda expensive for that (and I don’t like F360 anyway).
Have you used Deskproto much? I’m wondering how good it is?
I don’t believe they have adaptive clearing like Fusion does. That particular toolpath is pretty magical in terms of making aluminum machining easy and accessible. Fusion is far easier to learn than Deskproto too.
You can get a free/cheap Fusion personal license:
The kinda annoying thing about the free version is they don’t let you do rapid feedrates. Honestly if you’re doing any kind of regular work the price they’re charging is decent.
I downloaded deskproto but really haven’t used it yet.
Any questions I had they were very responsive…
I am waiting to get my ex controller to arrive…hopefully next week…and then I will setup the rotary. then I will give it a serious try. no adaptive clearing but good for 4th axis…even 5th axis
I just spent some time looking into Deskproto. They say they support 4 and 5 axis, but it looks to me like they really only let you use 3 axis at a time, the 4th and 5th are just indexing. I couldn’t find any examples of it actually using 4 or 5 axis simulatneously. So basically its not any better than Vectric for 3D models. Adding the indexing line in Gcode is very easy, so I wouldn’t pay for a SW package just to do that.
It’s possible it may be better in that it can actually index. Vectric just re-maps your X or Y to A moves. Once you map one axis to A you can’t have any more X moves.
The huge advantage to Fusion, and possibly DeskProto is you can do true 4th axis indexing. This means that you can do a “rotisserie” cut AND you can rotate a part to a particular angle and do XY and Z moves on it.
Vectric can only do a rotisserie and it can only spin 0-360. Fusion allows unlimited 360 rotation so it’s a lot more time efficient.
In this video I went a little too hard with a worn out bit, but the final product turned out great. My only regret was not using the dust shoe… This spit chips EVERYWHERE.
@jjneeb If you scrub through this video you’ll see some true 4 axis work. This is a Fusion 360 generated toolpath:
I use fusion 360 (low tier paid license) to design every thing. I export stl and import it into DeskProto when I want to do 4th axis.
Fusion has some 4th axis stuff at the low tier paid option but it was all but useless for what I wanted to do. If you want to cut something more complicated than a cylinder with a groove in it, for instance a simple cone, you have to buy the expensive license (> $1000 per year)
Deskproto takes a lot of getting used to. But you can flog it to do what you want. It might be faster to carve it by hand then figure out how to do a complicated operation in DeskProto.
I pay with credits. You buy 100 credits for $300. Then you are charged 10 credits for 24 hours of use. This makes it a lot more palatable if you are only using it for specific small projects. The features in the manufacturing extension make doing rotary stuff so much easier.
That’s cool.
One of these days I’m going to work through the process of doing a 4 sided machining with Vcarve and adding in the rotations with the rotary axis for the simple minded folks like me who prefer Vcarve
That would actually be a nice feature for Vectric to add vs. actual 4 axis machinimg. Pretty simple but would probably cover most peoples needs.
Basically setup a 3 axis program, rotate the A, run another 3 axis program, etc.
Honestly it’s just about as hard as learning Fusion. Seriously, break your brain and try it. I did several years ago and it frustrated the heck out of me until one day it clicked.
It’s not as simple as VCarve, but for certain things (like true 4 axis work, and aluminum machining) it’s worth the effort.
I use both VCarve and Fusion depending on what I am doing, both of their strengths for sure.
