2D dynamic milling

- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to be talking about dynamic milling. Now dynamic milling has not been around for that long, maybe like 10 years. But the companies who are developing this style of tool path have been doing a lot of work over the past few years. And it's really becoming pretty amazing. Now, different companies use different names for the same thing. Some companies call it adaptive contouring, but all these type of tool paths are pretty much the same. They're what's called a constant engagement tool path. So traditionally if you had a regular end mill and you're machining on a pocket, as your going down a straight edge of the pocket, you're engaging maybe a quarter of the end mill. Now as you get into the corner of that pocket, bad things start happening because you were about a quarter of the tool engagement. And all of a sudden, now that engagement goes up to over half of the tool, so it goes up by 50% or 100%. So- and that can really cause a lot of trouble. So, we get chatter, we might even break the tool, or it really depends on how fast you're going with that tool and that's a problem. So that's what the adaptive contouring, the dynamic milling, some of these adaptive tool paths, what they do is make the cutter engage the same amount of material no matter where it is in your tool path. So as you get into a corner the machine backs off and instead of going straight into the corner, it may do a few loops in the corner, so you're not engaging any more than you defined in your tool path. That makes it so you can go full speed ahead into the corner and not even have worry about it, because that allows you to maximize your tool path feed rate and not have to worry about breaking that tool when you go into a corner because the software is calculating how to not over-engage the tool. So let's go ahead and jump into MasterCAM and I'll show you how it works. Now right over here, you can see I've taken the same part we've been working with and I've put a big pocket in the center of that. Now I want to remove all that material. Now this is generally a roughing operation, we just want to get that material out of there, and that is where dynamic milling really shines. Okay, so head up here to 2D HighSpeed tool paths, and you can see I've got this dynamic mill, I've got this dynamic contour, I've got area, peel, and blend. So these are pretty much different variations of the same dynamic milling tool path. Let's go ahead and just choose the very first one here, dynamic mill. As far my machine region, I'm going to choose the bottom of that pocket right there, and if you go over to chains you can see it's just that one chain. Click OK, and right over here we've got dynamic mill selected. But I could switch over here to area mill, so notice what the picture down here will change to if I change to area mill, it's doing more of a kind of a traditional pocket there. I can also do this dynamic contouring so you can use that for just doing a contour but not over-engaging that tool when you get into these corners. Notice these little loops it's doing here, when it gets into there. Alright, same thing with peel mill. This is pretty much going to be removing some material across and you're just kind of peeling that material away, so it's a very efficient tool path. And then the same thing as blend mill, another cool way, you're just kind of going back and forth but you're removing that material as you go. These are all pretty much dynamic tool paths or what we call HighSpeed tool paths. But in this one I'm going to be focusing on dynamic mill, so here it is. Alright, so right over here and choose a tool. I'm going to choose this half-inch endmill. Now the stock. I'm go ahead and just define it under parameters. I'm going to make sure that I'm doing a climb operation. So you look at the stepover, that's going to be 25% of the tool so it's an eight of an inch of a cut. Now we are going to be going to full depth with this cutter, so that might be a little bit heavy, so let's go ahead and say, let's use like 13 or 14%, let's say type 14 there, and that's going to be only 70 thousandths, which is fine, but I'm going to be cutting 1.25 deep so you can see I'm using the entire flute length of my tool so I don't want to take that big of a radial cut. Alright, minimum tool path radius looks good, percent of tool- So you take a look at these things here, and because this is a roughing operation, you generally want to leave a little bit of material on the walls as well as the floor. I generally won't leave 50 thousandths, but maybe 30 thousandths, it makes sense. Alright so that way we can come back with a regular pocket and just kind of clean all that up and it's going to look real nice. Okay, once you've got that, you could go over here to depth cuts if you wanted to but, I don't, I want to go straight down, all the way to 1.25 deep, all the way into the material, and start my dynamic milling operation. Alright, my entry motion, so I can helix in, I can do all these different things here. I can profile around, I can do a whole -- all kinds of things but helix in's generally a pretty good one to go with. And you can adjust that radius if you need to, and play around with these settings if you like but right now let's just go ahead and leave them as they are. Linking parameters. The depth, let's go ahead and just choose one of these points, define that depth, and we'll type in absolute. Let's try that one out. Click there, absolute, now it says -1.25. Great, top of stock, which we're going to define right up here. Okay, right at zero. Alright. Next, come down here to coolant, make sure we've got coolant on then click on OK. Now what that's going to do is it's going to go ahead and calculate all these tool paths, and if I spin my model around here a little bit, let's zoom in here, you can see exactly what's going to happen. So you can see all the little lines, that that tool's going to be going round and round and round and clearing out that material, and it's going to full depth, right, so we're taking a very small step over, but we are taking out all our material in one shot. Let's go ahead and back plot it and I'll show you what happens. Alright so, I have that operation selected, come over here to back plot, go ahead and hit play, you can kind of see it's going round and round and round and round, circular at first and then it kind of starts going back and forth, back and forth, to do that operation. Pretty cool. So that is what we call adaptive contouring, or dynamic milling, or basically a HighSpeed toolpath. There's a bunch of ways people in the industry call this type of operation, but MasterCAM calls it dynamic milling, and again it's a HighSpeed operation designed to kind of go to full depth, utilize some of the latest and greatest, cool tools that have been designed for some of these new types of tool paths, and you can really get a lot of benefit in your machinery operations by using dynamic milling, and some of the great tools that have been designed specifically for these types of operations.