I made some more progress on the skateboard truck today; unfortunately, it's pretty slow going as there are many features on the part, and I have to double-check my work continually.
I'm getting excited to start running this on Monday and will be an exciting experience. It's helped quite a bit that I did a lot of work on the Pocket NC (smaller 5-axis machine), which gives me the range of possibilities and how to do it properly.
An excellent rule of thumb I learned from one of the first tutorials I took on the Pocket NC was always to keep the Z-axis pointed toward you, the x-axis to the right, and y-axis up. With this setup, you ensure the machine is going in the right direction and prevents mistakes like the a-axis going negative.
I'm a little unsure of posting the gcode if there are some settings I need to play around with, like limiting the maximum rotation on the different axis. That was one thing I liked about the Pocket NC was that you could set a hard limit on how far each part of the machine went, and it would give an error when posting the code. It threw me off the first time it happened and had me stumped for some time until I realized it was preventing me from posting me bad code.
Another feature I like with Fusion is its new simulated stock option when selecting a toolpath; it shows the stock outcome of all the previous toolpaths and instantly indicates what the new toolpath will do. The benefit of this is that instead of simulating your entire operation to see what the outcome is, you can now get away with posting the areas you want to check. The downside is that it's not super accurate and is a little rough around the edges, but it's not a problem if you're trying to see finishing passes and don't want to run through all the adaptive clearing.