Say Goodbye to V2
Unless I get any negative feedback in the next day or two, V3 is going to be moved to the “stable” download branch and V2 will go away forever. If you have a chance to run the latest V3 through it’s paces before then I’d appreciate any positive or negative feedback.
Robert,
I really like Meshcam and think it is a great value for the investment. I purchased Meshcam
over a year ago and have been updating every time
you put out a new version. Until this week, I
haven’t really pushed, but now I am in the process
of making a complicated maple pattern for foundy
work that has draft and compound curves all over.
Last nite, I was roughing (using 3 ver. 17) the
interior of the piece and noticed a couple of things that you might be interested in. My depth
of cut is 0.050 in, cutter dia 0.500, step over is
0.350 using flat bottom end mill. I have been following the discussion on eratic, sporadic Z
moves. Even though I didn’t notice it when running Cut Viewer, I am experiencing negative
Z moves at random while making the perimeter pass.
Negative Z moves are sometimes as deep as the the
field passes. I assume that the perimeter pass is
designed to be one depth of cut higher than the
layer that is removing the bulk of material.
It doesn’t do this all the time. Another thing
that is really aggravating, is about three quarters of the time, as the cutter is positioning
for the perimeter cut, it does not retract and tries to cut at double the specified depth of cut.
Conversly, it does retract about a quarter of the time. I would be happy to email you the .nc file
for your inspection. Also a request. Is there any way you can add cut direction to waterline
finishing? Aluminum and hard maple need to climb
cut when waterline finishing but the software seems to assign direction at random.
Thanks, Gerald Gohlke
Gerald-
Go ahead and send me whatever you can so I can look at what’s going on. If I read your post correctly then you are seeing the unfortunate consequence of trying to project a point on a steep surface- even tiny moves can cause the point to drop way down. The filters in Built 17 should have improved this but there are still some cases where it can happen. If you can send your STL and toolpath parameters then I will see if this is the problem and if your case can be improved.
V4 will have consistent waterline direction. A benefit of this roughing filtering is that I can use much of the code to implement the waterline improvements.
-Robert