In this lesson we'll explore rest machining with a 3D adaptive toolpath. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to create a 3D adaptive toolpath and modify toolpath height to restrict cutting area. For this lesson, we want to get started with the supply data set, complex 3D adaptive rest machining. We've seen this part before and you can see in the design that we already have an adaptive operation. This is removing a lot of material and for now, I want to go into my options to turn off the in-process stock display, and I'm also going to go in and I'm going to turn off my links, leads, and cutting moves, so that way I'm not seeing these on the screen for right now. When we're dealing with these adaptive motions, a lot of times the toolpath is going to clutter up the screen when we're trying to see exactly what's happening, so for now I'm going to just turn those off but you feel free to leave them on if you want. The first thing that I want to do here is I want to understand this tool number 10 which is our 1/2 inch flat end mill. I want to understand what we can do to begin to remove more material. I'm going to start by right-clicking and duplicating this operation. When we create a duplicate, we're using exactly the same operation. I first want to go in, I'm going to select it and then click on it again to rename it, and I'm going to call this adaptive one rest. Because I'm going to go back and simply remove material that was left behind by that large tool. We can begin by editing this and the first thing that we want to do is change our tool. We're going to be using tool number 8 which is the 1/4 inch flat end mill, and then we're going to go in and we're going to make some adjustments to some of our options. First we need to turn on rest machining. From rest machining, we have several options, from set-up stock, from bodies, from file, and from previous operations. We're going to use from previous operations and we want to make sure that we machine the cusps, and that we machine the areas between those transitions. When we look at this, those cusps are what happen or what's left behind when we're transitioning from one surface to another, so we're going to leave those as is and we'll leave the default adjustment offset as it is. Without changing any other settings, we'll go ahead and say "Okay". Remember that because these are roughing, we are still leaving stock behind, so we're not trying to get rid of all the material, we'll do that with finishing passes. But we want to come back and we want to try to remove more material that was left behind. I'm going to go ahead and select setup 1 and simulate to see what we've done. I'm going to jump past the first operation and then I'm going to begin playing the second operation. You can see that it is jumping back up and over we have some rapid movements but it is taking away material. Everything that's blue is being removed in this operation. It's removing the top, it's going into that pocket that was omitted from the large tool. It's taking care of some of those flat faces. These are areas where we needed to come back with a smaller tool and get a little bit closer to that final shape. There are some areas that are still left behind that the resolution is not quite perfect but we did remove more material especially in this bottom pocket and that was really what the goal of this operation was, and we did it without spending a bunch of time cutting in the air. If we take a look at just the cutting moves and we select our rest, you can see that all of these cutting moves are down close to that part. If we're to select the first operation, you can see that we're above the part removing the material. This is exactly what we want to see, we want to see it down close to the material, that way we're not spending time just cutting in the air. But there's still a bit more that we can do. Let's go ahead and duplicate this one more time and make another edit. I'm not going to rename it in this instance because we are likely not going to keep it, but we're going to start by changing the tool. Let me go back into my Cloud uploaded library and this time I'm going to take tool number 7, which is a 3/16 flat end mill. Because we duplicated the last operation that was already rest machining, we don't have to worry about making any additional adjustments. I'm going to leave all the same settings and I'm going to simply say "Okay" and see what we have. Another thing that we can do is we can go back and turn on the in-process stock display, which will allow us to see what's happening here without simulating it. You can see that it's still calculating, it's going to take a bit of time. The smaller tool will have smaller steps by default and as we take a look, I'm going to go back in and I'm going to hide the cutting moves so we can just see the stock. Our first operation is that 1/2 inch end mill. The second operation goes down to 1/4 to remove some more material, and the third operation is a smaller end mill and it's not removing very much, but you can see that it is actually going in and it's cleaning this backup a little bit, so if we go back and forth between the two, you can see that it is removing more material. The main difference that's happening with tool 7 is that we are actually dropping into these pockets. Because we're using our stock to leave on these adaptive roughing operations, it's not getting down to the bottom of the pocket and it's not actually cutting the wall of the pocket, it's still leaving that stock to leave. This means that there's really not a lot that's happening, specifically with this tool with the exception of those pockets. If I bring back the cutting moves and I take a look at this, you can see that the tool is going around the part. Sometimes this can be hard to see, but if we view it from the top you can see that it's wrapping around the edges and it's going around the part. There's likely some more that we can add to this, you can see it's going down into this pocket, but again a lot of this already happened when we did this with the 1/4 inch end mill. It really doesn't make a lot of sense for us to keep this operation because it's just adding more time and it's not really giving us much of a benefit. We can easily go back into these holes, create a pocket operation and clear them out quickly. We can play around with this by making more changes or more adjustments and it might be a case where we want to keep this and get rid of the 1/4 inch. But I'm going to just err on the side of caution, I'm going to say that we're going to use the 1/4 inch to clear out that material, instead of coming back with the smaller tool. But what I want to do before we delete this operation and before we make any drastic changes, is I'm going to come back into my library and this time I'm going to change to a different tool. I want to take a look at tool number 6 which is 1/8 inch ball-end mill. Now, using the 1/8 inch ball-end mill is obviously a very different profile on the end of the tool. This means that we're not using that square edge of the flat end mill anymore and likely it can get a little bit closer to what that final contour is because it has that rounded edge on the bottom. Also keep in mind that we're not using this as a finishing operation, so because it's not a finishing operation, we're not actively trying to get a good surface finish on all those areas. But it will definitely have a change in all of the parameters or the settings that happened because a lot of those are simply based on the tool itself. Now that it's done, let's go ahead and turn the cutting moves back off and take a look at what we have. The difference between the adaptive with the flat end mill and the ball-end mill is a little bit closer to that final shape. We can see if we view it from the front that the profile of the fill-it is closer to what the actual profile of fill-it is. When we go back to using that 1/4 inch end mill, you can see that we have these square steps. If we view other areas like these small pockets, you can see that those are actually closer to round, so using that ball-end mill gets us a little bit closer to that final shape. Keep in mind though that we are also using it in these pockets and again it's just not going to be an ideal situation. There are, of course, plenty of other things that we can do. We can make adjustments to those settings. For example, we can reduce some of the adjustment values down to be a bit smaller. We can change from using stock contour and we can instead use a machining boundary based on the silhouette of a part, or we can select a certain area that we only wanted to focus on. Maybe we want to keep it just in this area and we want to keep the tool inside of there, allowing it to come in from the outside. Then it's going to rebuild that operation, focusing only on that area and finishing or going back in and taking care of material that was left behind. We're not quite at that stage yet, we're not at the point where we're going to focus on our finishing operations, but it is again important for us to explore different ways in which we can program these parts. Using these adaptive operations for an initial roughing with a large tool and then subsequent rest roughing operations before we get to finishing is definitely an efficient process or an efficient way that we can take care of some of these complex parts. But before I move on, let's go ahead and make sure that we do save that file.
