Implementing Our First Turning Operation

In this chapter, we will practice our first basic facing operation. Through doing this, we will discover how to get all the cutting parameters using the Sandvik CoroPlus plugin and how to import them inside Fusion 360. Plus, we will deeply analyze all the options available in this first Facing command since most of them will occur on other types of machining as well.

After this, we will check how to simulate tool movements to check for collisions or other errors, and finally, we will take a fast look at how to generate G-code.

The goal of this chapter is to lay concrete bases for future setups. As we will discover, the same key concepts and commands are encountered over and over again throughout the MANUFACTURE environment; understanding the main commands and options for a basic feature will give us a solid ground for further developments.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Setting up a facing operation
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Technical requirements

In this chapter, we are going to start from an existing setup (like the one created in Chapter 2), therefore you are supposed to have a stock and a WCS already set.

We are also going to use Sandvik CoroPlus to evaluate the cutting parameters faster without calculating all the values by hand; therefore, having a CoroPlus license might be a good idea. However, at the moment, you should already be able to roughly estimate all the values on your own.

Setting up a facing operation

One of the first operations we always have to implement is part facing. You may be wondering why. The reason is quite simple: we should always first perform those operations that will give us a true reference point for further operations or for measuring. Since, most of the time, the origin is on the front of the stock or the front of our part, a first facing operation will allow us to measure where the origin is located properly.

As you can see here, the origin is set to be on the front face of our stock:

Figure 4.1: Lack of reference on the stock face

However, since the stock is never precisely cut, we may have a bit of trouble trying to take measurements from the origin!

Let’s now suppose that we need to remove 3 millimeters (mm) of material in front of the part from a low-alloy steel stock with a diameter of 55 mm:

Figure 4.2: Material to be removed

At the moment, we will focus...

Discovering tool simulation

What is tool simulation? The short answer is very simple: it is a procedure where we check whether the result of a turning operation we just set is giving the attended results or not.

In the most ideal scenario, it is just a command that confirms that we are great machinists and that no errors are happening. However, sometimes, we may discover that we still have to tune the operations a little bit more.

While watching the toolpath, we should always check for these four errors:

1. Tool and shank collisions with the chuck or with the stock
2. Entry and exit points located in unsafe areas
3. Tool trying to machine an already machined area
4. Difference between the intended result and the simulated result

It seems that there are so many things that could go in the wrong way that we need to check from our toolpath. Luckily, there is quite a handy tool that takes a great part of the effort. We are about to discover this tool.

Let’...

Checking the generated G-code

As you may recall, after setting up all our operations with Fusion 360, we need a postprocessor to generate a file containing instructions that can be read and used by our machine. This set of instructions is called G-code, and every machine may speak a slightly different dialect of G-code.

Note

I would like to highlight the fact that there are hundreds of different postprocessors, each operating with different options and giving different outputs. For this reason, it is impossible to take a deep look at the postprocessing world in the following pages; this would require several books on this subject alone. If you need to understand more about the translation process, I can only suggest you look at the machine documentation or postprocessor developers’ documentation.

First of all, we need to launch the Post Process command, which you can find here:

Figure 4.26: Post Process button

After launching the command...

Summary

At first, we discovered why it is so important to start with a facing operation, then, using Sandvik CoroPlus, we could get all the cutting parameters to implement.

After this introduction, we deeply described all the options for the Facing command. This is very important because, as we are about to discover, there are many other turning and milling strategies that we will implement to machine our part, but they will all look and work in the same way.

Once we completed our first operation, we discovered how to simulate our tool and how to check for errors; since we couldn’t spot any, we moved forward with postprocessing up to the G-code generation.

It is fair to say that all the efforts we spent on these pages on such a simple facing operation will be worth it time and time again.

Now that we’ve got an idea of a typical workflow with CAM operations, we can move forward with more complex machining strategies.

In the next chapter, we will keep machining...