Lesson 1 - Import, Stock, Machining Prep

00:09

Welcome to the first lesson in this FeatureCAM for lathes class.

00:13

In this lesson, we will be programming a part starting from an engineering drawing, utilizing FeatureCAM's sketching and dimensioning tools to create geometry as the basis for our machined features.

00:27

After that, we'll explore a few of the simulation options available to us

00:32

and make a few common revisions to our program before generating and saving our final NC Code.

00:40

But before we start programming any features, in this video, we'll cover the first three steps of our workflow and setup our part by working through the open, stock, and machining preparation sections of our workflow.

00:55

Let's start by opening a new document.

00:59

As we open FeatureCAM, the first thing we met with is this new document page.

01:05

Here we can open any recent documents that we've already created or start our own new document from scratch.

01:12

As this is a turning class, I'll select the turning document option.

01:18

Depending on the product here you have, this may say turning or it may say turn mill, like it does for me.

01:25

Turn mill simply means that we have the ability to program lathes with live tooling as well.

01:32

So with that selected, let's indicate millimeter as a unit of measurement.

01:37

Allow FeatureCAM stock wizard to help us setup our stock and leave the default of my configuration.

01:44

With that, let's create our new document.

01:49

As we can see, the first thing we're met with when opening a new document is the stock wizard.

01:56

FeatureCAM is full of wizards that help us to break down complicated tasks into a series of simple questions and definitions.

02:05

For the shape of our stock, we have a few different options: Block, Round or N-Sided.

02:13

Remember a stock is the piece of material that we will be machining our part from.

02:19

For this example, we'll use a round stock shape with the length of 60 millimeters and outer diameter of 75 millimeters and no inner diameter.

02:30

After defining the size and shape of our stock material, next, FeatureCAM will ask us to define our stock material type.

02:39

By default, we can see that FeatureCAM has selected aluminum from FeatureCAM's comprehensive list of material types.

02:47

We'll leave the default selection of aluminum.

02:50

However, note that we could either select a material from FeatureCAM's comprehensive list of default material types, or we could define a new material from scratch.

03:02

As we indicate a stock material, FeatureCAM takes that material's properties into consideration, and automatically calculates the feeds and speeds for each of our feature's operations.

03:14

Finally, we’ll indicate no multi-axis positioning since this is a simple lathe part without any live tooling.

03:23

The next page of this wizard moves us into a next step in our workflow, machining preparation.

03:30

Generally in the machining preparation step, there are three main things we're concerned with: the setup location, tool crib, and post processor.

03:41

And as we can see here, the next thing that wizard is having us define is our setup location, or a touch off point.

03:49

This is the point from which all our NC Code will be calculated.

03:53

We’ll leave all the default values for this first page, and then align our setup location to the front stock face.

04:01

Finally, let's offset our Z axis by 0.75 millimeters.

04:06

We're going to want to face off some material for my stock.

04:09

So by adding this offset, our setup will be aligned with the front face of our part rather than with our stock.

04:17

With that, we can press "Finish", and here we are met with the stock properties page.

04:23

Anytime we create a new feature or define a stock, we’re always met with a properties page.

04:30

This allows us to go back at any time and make edits to any of the parameters we've defined, such as the stock size or material type.

04:39

Press "OK" to close this window.

04:43

If we ever want to reopen the stock properties, simply double click the stock in the graphics window

04:49

or double click stock1 in the Part View on the left side of our user interface.

04:56

We have now worked through the stock portion of our workflow and started machining preparation by defining our setup location.

05:04

To finish our machine preparation step, we should now indicate the tool crib we would like to use and select a post processor.

05:14

In FeatureCAM, tool cribs are a collection of tools that FeatureCAM can pull from when creating a feature.

05:21

Every time we create a new feature, in the background, FeatureCAM will select an appropriate tool from the tool crib based on the dimensions and properties of our feature.

05:33

When you use FeatureCAM, your tool crib will consist of the tools which are available on your machine.

05:40

For this example though, we’ll be using one of the default tool cribs, which came with FeatureCAM.

05:47

To indicate a tool crib, navigate to the bottom right corner of the user interface, select the active tool crib header, and ensure that the basic metric tool crib is selected.

05:59

By default, FeatureCAM has a basic tool crib, which is in imperial unit, a basic metric tool crib, and a tools tool crib that combines all the default tools from the basic and basic metric tool cribs.

06:14

With our basic metric tool crib selected, our final machining preparation step is to indicate a post processor for our part.

06:23

Post processors take the features we create and turn them into readable NC Code, which is specific to each individual machine and controller.

06:33

For this example, we’ll simply use the Turn Post 1 training post processor.

06:38

Similar to selecting a tool crib, we can choose a post processor by selecting the active post processor in the bottom right corner, and browsing to the post processor file we want to use.

06:51

With that selected, we can select "OK", and now that we have worked through the first three steps of our workflow, open stock and machining preparation, we're ready to move on to our next step, creating features.