Try adding 6 zeros to the Z coordinates. IE: "-0.05000000"
JR
Dweller in the cellar
Jon Elson wrote:
Hello, all,
Is anyone still suign Bobcad/CAM Ver. 16.1? I bought this a number of
years ago, and after some effort to learn the programs quirks, I got
pretty good results. The toolpath wasn't always as efficient as I
might get if I wrote the G-code by hand, but it was quite reliable,
and always did what I wanted it to do.
I don't use it all that often, as it is more eficient for me to do
a lot of things using some conversational-like programs that I wrote
to cut round holes, rectangular holes, etc. So, I only use it a few
times a year.
I did a cutout for a small (computer style) fan, 12 little pie-wedge
sort of pockets, with a 1/8" end mill. Well, I didn't like the roughing
procedure, it left a rough edge and broke a couple end mills. So, I
went back to the original drawing and tried to do better. I created a
new offset line inside the offset for the final dimension, and then
tried to get Bobcad to cut to the inner offset in 3 step-downs, and then
cut the outer (final) offset at full depth. Well, the G-code looked
like TOTAL garbage! I think the X-Y part was pretty reasonable,
although there were many places where it repeated the same X-Y
coordinates over and over. But, the Z coordinates just made NO sense.
I had the clearance plane set to +0.1", and the final depth set to
-0.15", and the step-down set to 0.05", so it should just produce
coordinates of -.05, -.1, and -.15" But, I got all kinds of screwy
Z coordinates, bouncing from +.15 to -.154, and jumping up and down
instead of smoothly working its way down .050" at a time. I've never
seen it do anything like this before. Did I set something wrong?
Has the code somehow gone "stale", a config file gotten corrupted,
or something like that?
I ended up extracting what I could from the messy G-code for one of
the little pockets and writing my own program to rewrite it 12 times
at 30 degre intervals. But, i don't understand why I couldn't get it
to do essentially the same thing I've done many times before.
Thanks for any insight anyone can provide.
Jon
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