My first 5-axis part took me 8 hours and I still messed up the toolpath

Last Wednesday I finally got to run our new Haas UMC-500 at the shop in Phoenix. Spent forever setting up the CAM and verifying clearances, then my first cut slammed the tool into the vise at rapid feed. Had to redo the whole setup and lost another 3 hours debugging my post processor. Has anyone else had a rough transition from 3-axis to 5-axis work?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowan228d ago

Man, that's rough. What worked for me was spending a solid hour just simulating the whole thing in CAM with the machine model before touching any metal. Also, I started using a single roughing pass way above the part to dry run the toolpath first. It saved me a ton of broken tools for sure.

norag6628d ago

My buddy Dave tried that dry run trick and still managed to crash a $500 endmill... forgot to take the soft jaw out. He just stood there staring at the machine for like five minutes.