Man, I am pleased with this piece; the complete turnaround time was about 3.5h from start to finish. That includes programming, setting up the machine, running first op, soft jaws, and second op. Definitely, my fastest part yet, and everything is within 0.0005."
I'm taking a slightly different method when programming this and the following pieces where I am not relying on any automatic toolpath generation. Previously I would use the 3D adaptive and pocket clearing toolpaths, which take your initial 3D model setup and automatically put together the program for you, which I would run into issues when needing to make small changes to previous toolpaths.
I am taking advantage of this new method of creating custom sketch geometry and manually drawing out boundaries I can select. The downside is that it's not connected to the 3D model itself, and I can run into issues if I move the model geometry. It does take longer to program the parts, but I'm getting that insurance of doing everything manually, so I know right away when something doesn't add up, rather than finding out later.
The part is very basic and only required two operations, the second being held in soft jaws. I put these pieces side by side in a piece of bar stock and bored a hole in the center I could use as my work origin when flipping them over. When I cut the soft jaws, I could technically use the same setup origin for the second operation, but when I am using any clamping force, the geometry could move a tad, which would throw things off. Utilizing the hole, I can get an accurate location point for the part once it's in the vice and clamped down.
I've got 5 more pairs of parts to make, which will be done on the 4th axis and get really hairy when it comes to small detail and hard-to-reach places which I'm really excited for. I love making smaller parts vs. big ones; something about it is so much more satisfying.