Understanding Drilling Formats Understanding Drilling Formats
General Tutorial Description
This tutorial is designed to give you an understanding of drilling formats. You will create programs that use explicit linear moves and canned cycles. This tutorial is in metric units.
Specific Instructions
Open 001.fm from the training CD. This is just a simple hole that is spot-drilled and drilled.
Generate toolpaths and single step through the program. You can see that this simple program spot drills in a single move, changes tools and peck drills the hole. The spot drilling is performed by the Drill_Cycle format and the peck drilling is performed by the Deep_Hole cycle.
Program_Start
Z_Rapid
Drill_Cycle
Cycle_Cancel
Z_Rapid
TOOL_CHANGE
Z_Rapid
Deep_Hole
Cycle_Cancel
Z_Rapid
Program_End
File_End
Edit the hole. Click on the hole operation and change the drill cycle to chip break on the Cycle tab.
Regenerate the code. You will see that the call to the Deep_Hole cycle has been changed to a call to the Chip_break cycle.
If the .cnc file does not contain NC codes for drilling cycles, then FeatureCAM will create explicit moves. Open the post TEXTNODRILLCYCLES.cnc and create the code. The following code (without canned cycles) is created.
Program_Start
Z_Rapid
Linear_Move
Z_Rapid
TOOL_CHANGE
Z_Rapid
Linear_Move
Z_Rapid
Linear_Move
Z_Rapid
Linear_Move
Z_Rapid
Program_End
File_End