Simulating the operations

- [Instructor] Throughout this course, we've been using the simulate tool to see what the operations are going to look like. Now in this video, I want to go through and actually show you all the options inside of Simulate. So let's jump right in, right here I've got a whole bunch of different operations like facing, drilling, spot drilling and so on, adaptive clearing and things like that. Now let's go head and simulate all those. So I can just go ahead and select the first one, hold down shift and select the last one so it's going to select all those operations. Head up here to Simulate, click on that button right there and right over here you can see the first option we have is just play, we have pause, we can have go back to the beginning, we can have previous, next and you kind of step through that. This is your speed bar, you can make it go faster or you can make it go slower, your options are there. As far as showing the tool I can show the holder, just the flute if you wanted to, you could show the shoulder, you could show the shaft, you can show all these different options even the whole head. So I'm going to go ahead and just show the holder. Right, you can also switch here between which, if you want to make it transparent or not, a couple different options there. We want to show the tool path, or I can turn that off, either way it works, and if you do want to show the tool path you can show it before, you have a whole bunch of options here of how you want to show that actual tool path. Down here under the option you can show how those lines look, so you can make a thin line, a normal line, or a thick line, your choice. I'm going to go ahead and just put it back to normal. Same thing over here with the rapid moves you can show the feedrates, or you can change something to flow, something like that but anyway, I'm going to switch it back to normal for right now. You also have a few options down here as far as how you want to link those together and show them. If you want to show endpoints for instance, if you want to show the current model and the moves and so on. So you can turn these options on or off depending on what you want to see. The next one is Show Stock. I generally like to do that. And you have a whole bunch of options here. So I can reset it to the default, I can come down here and zoom in, I can do a whole bunch of things so definitely look through all those and kind of play with them to see what things look like. You can also color things by operation, or tool, or movement, or feedrate or anything like that so we can see how things are happening. I generally like to look at the operations so you can see what tool is doing what to that piece of stock. Alright, down here under Normal you can also choose Very fast, Very fast, or Fast, Very Fast, Normal, Good, or Very good. I like to put it on Very good so I can really see very detailed what's happening to that stock, especially if you've got a decent computer with some fairly good graphics, Very good shouldn't be that hard for the computer to figure out and you can really see exactly what's goin on in your model. Down here you can verify the position as you start moving through this operation. You start playing through this job. Here I can speed things up or slow things down as I move through there and then I come down here and I can see where exactly that position is. Take a look at the Spindle speed, Feedrate and all that other stuff that's happening right now in that move. So definitely take a look at that. Especially if you're trying to fit yourself into some type of a boundary and you want to make sure that it's going to fit or you're not going to exceed your z-travel or something like that. Definitely take a look at these position coordinates. Down here under Operation we can also take a look at which operation is happening when. You can also take a look at the machine we specified. You can't really change anything there. It's giving you more of a heads up display, showing you what machine is actually being used. And then the last one down here is Statistics. So Statistics is great because it's going to tell you how long it's going to take to do all these operations. What the distance is, how many operations are done, and how many tool changes. So two very important things there, one is the operational time and the second one is tool changes. Alright, especially if you're doing a lot of parts on a job, you want to keep track of how many times that machine's going to change tools 'cause that takes a lot of time, and also puts wear on the machine. Same thing with your runtime, you might want to do a time study. We're going to be looking at doing a time study here very soon but these are the statistics we're going to be using for doing a time study. You might want to make an operation, run the statistics on it, see how long it's going to take, and then maybe make that same operation in a different way, and see if you can get it done a little bit faster, or the better load on the tool or something like that and really see what the statistics look for different options for running a job. Especially if you're in a production type environment and you're going to be making a lot of a part. It definitely pays off to do a little time study to see what's going to be the best way to make those parts. That's pretty much it for Simulation. I definitely use this tool all the time and I definitely recommend running simulation prior to actually cutting any parts, that way you're sure that you're going to get what you're expecting.