2D Face Milling – Autodesk Inventor CAM | #techtalk

Here is a quick snippet from our Inventor CAM webinar, focusing on 2d Face Milling.

Inventor CAM | 2D Face Milling

So, what we’ve got here is a component, relatively simple. if you look at it in that view you can see it’s what we’d call a dog bone-like shape.

A couple of bores in and it’s got some chamfer details on there.

If I just quickly drop into the 3d model and the modelling environment, that you are all no doubt familiar with. you can see that there is an extra tab, just about halfway across.

If I open up the CAM tab and if I go into my browser and activate that CAM browser there, you will see now that I’ve got the option to create my set up and my toolpaths.

First option there as you can see, we’ve got a face one operation, that falls under this category of 2d milling. We’ve got 2d milling and 3d milling. 2d milling is contour driven, 3d milling is surface driven.

2d milling is perfect for this component because we’ve got a lot of contours and we’ve no surfaces. we’ve no fancy shapes we need to produce on there.

If I go up to this icon ‘face’, it will open up this panel. And first and foremost, it has selected the 50mm face. I just click tool I can do a search through my existing library or I can pre-set a series of tools within this component, select 50mm face and that’s it.

Face-Milling Geometry

So I’m going to move to the next tab, which geometry. It will look at my stock. So I want to Face Mill all the way along this component.

If I move to the heights tab, you will see from the side view, got colour coordinated heights, got clearance heights, retract, feed and bottom. Every feature that you use has got that colour coordination.

For passes I am going to make no changes again and the same goes for linking.

So all I’ve done s select one tool, you can see now the toolpath has been highlighted on the component. There you can see the red arrow.

If I press play, it’s pretty much done what I wanted it to do. I open up the passes tab there, we got an option to pass extension. If I just put a figure in there, such as 30mm from the centre. Can you see now it comes all the way off? So it doesn’t produce anything called a back-cut so you will get a better surface finish from older machines.

And that’s it, Face Milling, very minimal. One change made but otherwise straight out of the box.

For more information about Inventor CAM and 2D Face Milling take a look at our other videos here. Or contact the team at Quadra for more information