Denford Software & Machines

Hi,

Let's see, I guess the first thing to tell you is we have an old micromill that we updated the chip on. We are running VR Milling Ver 2.31.3.95 and utilizing QuickCAM Pro Ver 1.11.0.57 on Windows XP. Usually getting our model files (STL) from either SolidWorks or Pro/E. We have finally tried to start making parts, and run into errors (a yellow box) indicating most of the time that a radius has exceeded some limit. Sometimes we can stop the program go to the next command and run. Of course you can understand what happens when you do that, sometimes it works sometimes it cuts right through your part. The parts we are making certainly seem small enough, so I'm looking for ideas. Right now we are using the Denford Milling (inch) post processor in QuickCAM pro. I'm a little frustrated, because I can see that is is capable of making a very nice part. We have tried quite a few machining plans and have run into this error message with all we have tried so far (but will take suggestions there as well). Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Lew Baum

You can decreasing the Ramp In Radius in QuickCAM pro, that should stop any big arcs appearing around the outside of the model/billet and possibly going out of the machine's limits.
Make sure you have some clearance all around the billet on the machine...you probably need to be able to jog to 1/4inch +ve and -ve of the billet in X and Y
eg, If the billet is very close to the front of the table, move it back a little and reset your workpiece offsets.

I'd also try using the metric post output from QuickCAM pro. There could be an issue with imperial arc values in VR Milling v2.

Will the metric post processor convert the model to metric if we started out in Imperial?

Lew

The metric post just outputs metric values in the gcode (.fnc file)
eg G01 X1 Y2
will become
G01 X25.4 Y50.8
Nothing else will change.
You can still run VR Milling in Inch mode so the display is inches, it will just be reading metric numbers from the program.