I'm having some odd issues with the swarf toolpath that finishes the top cab of the model truck I'm working on.
I keep running into faced and jagged finishes; it's really stumped me. I eventually had to put it off for several days and focused on the rest of the details to ruminate on the idea.
My initial thought about why this issue was occurring was to do with the tolerance and smoothing options. However, since it's a 5axis swarf toolpath, there aren't any options to play around with the smoothing, which I find quite odd. Even playing around with the tolerances didn't seem to make much of a difference. The smaller decimal points I went, the more the machine would stutter with all the points it had to hit. And the higher tolerance, I would get bigger portions of faceted sides.
I researched and found that there are a few settings you can play around with to improve the surface finishes, specifically for swarf toolpaths. Aparently, there is an internal machine smoothing setting that provides better quality parts. These are broken down into three commands read in the machine as P1, used to rough our material, P2 moderate tolerance, and P3 for fine finishing. It seems that the only downside to working with the higher detail setting is that of run time. From what I understand, this setting works by creating clean curved arcs between points rather than straight lines.
I quickly identified these P1-3 settings in my post-processor by turning the setting "Use G187" to yes, and it added a P3 line of code into the program. I haven't yet played around with this setting, but I'm really looking forward to the outcome! I also found that my post tolerance was set to 2 thou by default, so I was able to lower that. I also noticed a 'minimum arc tolerance' set to 0.01," which seems quite high for arcs, so I lowered that to 5 thou.
I also read about something called high-speed machining, which I thought was related to the actual speed the machine would move at, but it's actually referring to how fast the machine can read ahead in the code. I still have to do some more research into this, but it looks like another possible solution to my 5-axis problem.
I'm really looking forward to playing around with these settings and seeing if I can improve my surface finish quality on my parts!