Good afternoon all,

I have been teaching myself Solidworks CAM for the last few weeks and I have reached a point of being able to cut metal ok via the mach3 post processor but I have a few issues I cannot find a solution for so hopefully people on here with more experience will be able to help.

I have set up the technology database for my tooling and the operations I`m most likely to use and started my first part, a bracket to hold a model aircraft servo. I have setup the following operations: Face Mill (16mm Cutter) - Rough Mill (16mm cutter) - Contour Mill (16mm cutter) - Contour Mill (6mm cutter). I added the 16mm contour mill because the cleanup pass was also sending the cutter around the perimeter of the stock cutting fresh air. This approached is working ok but for the rough mill the program is plunging the cutter in to the stock and my light weight equipment cant really cope with this even when slowed to 25mm/min. I have looked through the entry options and the only other option that would work is ramp but even this is plunging to a certain degree. I am surprised that I cannot bring the cutter in to the stock from the side at depth exactly the same as when I perform the Face Mill operation, in Face Mill I have a menu for Leads/Links which allows me to customise this nicely in Rough Mill there are few options and nothing to get the cutter to enter from the side of the stock. Is there a better way of doing this? I have played with the air segment offset but this can only help if a lot of machining time is spent cutting fresh air.

I`m not a skilled machinist more an enthusiast but surely plunging the cutter in to the stock when machining an open pocket is not the best approach?

Any help and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I will grab some images off the CNC computer and post them later.

Thanks

Mike