Third attempt at making an impeller on the Pocket NC
I fixed the CAM toolpath from last time, so I thankfully didn't have the same oversight. I was able to get all the roughing passes with only one error. I accidentally set one of the last toolpaths to read as a 1/8" square mill when I was using a ball mill. I was able to catch the issue pretty quickly and restart it with the right tool. I have noticed the software that controls the Pocket NC is a bit finicky and crashed for no reason on two occasions.
After the roughing finished, I used the same 1/8" ball mill to do the finishing passes. I set the toolpath to do parallel passes with 0.007" stepover at 30 IMP. I noticed pretty quickly it would dig into areas where it couldn't reach before and cause everything to vibrate, which broke a few of the fins. I decided to take a look at what else Fusion had to offer for finishing passes and see what would work better. I found that the morphed spiral toolpath adapted nicely to its sharp contours and set it to take smaller bites; this worked amazingly well. I was able to even get into the crevises under the blades, leaving a smooth transition between them. I am thrilled with how it turned out, and even with the broken blades, I would have to say it's the best of the three I've made as far as learning goes.
You can really see the difference, on the first image, on the underside of the left blade is the parallel and the underside of the blade on the right is with the morphed spiral toolpath.