After getting a good portion of the rocket kits complete and ready to ship out, I decided to spend a bit more time working on the toolpath operation for the milling operation to improve time and tool efficiency.
I mainly wanted to do this because of the nagging feeling that the way I programmed it was extremely inefficient and that it was only a matter of time before a tool broke.
It felt somewhat interesting going through and optimizing, and changing some of the toolpaths. I was able to shave 17 minutes off the first operation alone, which is an absolute ton of time. I'm kicking myself for not taking the time early to make sure all the speeds and feeds were correct and connected as I had to individually go through each one and reset it to the correct new preset.
The main time suck for the operation was the finishing toolpath on the fins. My boss went the extra mile and had me add a particular machining pattern to make it look as if the fins were ejecting and the rocket lifting off. Basically, there is a central point that the toolpath makes a straight line out of, like an exploding star.
This toolpath alone was 11:20 of the 46:00 total time for the first operation.
The problem was that I initially had the endmill go one cutting direction, then would lift and move back for another pass. The time came in when the tool lifted and moved back across. I initially played around with trying to use rapid motions when retracting and lowering the retract height. Still, there always seemed to be a slight machine pause as it owuld transition from cutting to retracting. So after discussing it with my boss, I was given the go-ahead to change the toolpath to run both directions. I thought this would cut the time in half, but I was mistaken. It cut it down to 4:21 from the previous 11:20! This was huge, and the surface finish was of equivalent quality.
After that, I ran through the rest of the operation, making small improvements here and there, and got it all to run in 29:00 vs. the previous 46:00! My goal is to get these 1+2 operation parts to under an hour, which will speed up the time to get these sent out before the rush of work comes.
I also ran through and checked the plate's flatness after the first operation to ensure it's all even so that I won't run into issues as I did in the past.