We often get great questions from BobCAD users on finite subjects such as a particular features they are getting hung-up on in their CAD-CAM software. The latest comes from one of our rifle manufacturers and his question is as follows: “Why can’t I do a pocket mill and leave a cleanup on the bottom? My sides look good, but I can’t get a decent finish on the bottom.” When it comes to your pocket floor, there are a couple ways to handle this, let’s take a look.
1.) You can use a bottom allowance to leave stock to finish, creating 2 pocket operations, 1 to rough and 1 to finish the floor.
The benefits users get from doing it this way is they can change the Feedrate for the floor finish pass, giving you a much better surface finish.
2.) Use defined depths to create a skim pass for the final pass on the floor. With this workflow, you wouldn’t use a bottom allowance. Instead, you take a final pocket pass at .015 or whatever amount deep you appropriate. Defined depths allow you to program 2 heavier cuts and 1 light cut. The light cut should give you a better finish on the floor. Even depths will take your depth of cut based on the total depth and create even amounts per pass. Defined depths will take your depth of cut where it can and machine what’s left over for the final cut.
In the example image above, I have a total depth of .5 and my depth of cut is .2425. You can see there are 3 numbers of cuts. Two cuts will be made at .2425 and 1 cut will be made at .015- make sense?
Let me know in the comments section if this was useful! To give our newest CAD-CAM software a try, simply click “download”.
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