Inventor Nesting Push: CAM Cutting

00:13

The other way of using your nesting results for fabrication is to bring this Nest into an Inventor assembly for CAM purposes.

00:27

So here again, we select a sheet and we could use the Create 3D Model command.

00:33

But before we do that, I want to verify what my separation is between the parts here because that's important for my cutting operation.

00:45

So I quickly turn on the header,

00:49

and I see that this is Material 5,

00:52

and for Material 5, I defined an item separation of 0.2 inch.

01:01

So we'll keep that value in mind on the CAM site and we will use it.

01:08

So here, I select the sheet, go to Create 3D Model and it gives this dialogue.

01:21

The old behavior was to bring everything into a single file as a multi-body IPT.

01:28

That's only valid if you're concerned about fire count.

01:34

But I think the better solution would be to create a 3D model as an assembly in this particular folder,

01:41

which can be selected

01:44

and use the first option here which allows you to generate the 3D model with the real 3D shape in all its detail.

01:59

The fallback situation for DXF and DWG files is to use it as an extruded file, of course,

02:05

because we don't have the full detail there.

02:10

The other option here allows you to decide how you want to place the instances for the items.

02:19

If you select the group item here, we put all the identical instances in the same folder in the assembly,

02:29

you can include or exclude stock.

02:31

Once you proceed here, we start a new assembly and create stock and the parts.

02:46

You see here, the folder structure with all the parts in there.

02:53

If you look at the properties they're clearly using the right material and so on.

03:21

So in order to go to CAM, you just create a setup.

03:25

I prefer to put the setups first here.

03:28

And in that setup, we select a cutting operation obviously.

03:35

And for stock, we just pick the stock part that we have created in the 3D model command.

03:45

So we use the "from solid" option here.

03:48

The other thing you probably want to do is to set your origin of UCS in an appropriate place.

03:57

And I prefer to put it on a stock point here.

04:04

Once you've done that, you can go to isometric mode, and it gives you really the position of the part as it would be on the machine.

04:14

Once you have your setup, the only thing that remains to be done is creating a 2D profile operation.

04:22

I use here, not water jet or laser, but I use plasma.

04:27

And here is where the item separation comes into play.

04:33

So remember the 0.2 inch.

04:36

So we must make sure that we have a value smaller than that.

04:41

And I'll put myself really on the safe side with 0.075.

04:47

And for geometry,

04:52

I prefer to turn on the "select same plane faces" option that the advantage there is that you only need to select one of these faces,

05:06

and the system detects all the others because they're typically on the same height anyway for a nested sheet.

05:16

And then the only other thing to do is to probably cut out the inner loops first, generate this tool path.

05:28

Here's your tool pad and then duplicate that for the outer contour.

05:34

So I duplicate that 2D profile operation and change the setting to outer loops.

05:47

And we might at the same time want to add tabs here, and I'll leave the default for the tabs.

05:57

So that way the parts don't fall out of the machine, and with the risk of blocking the machine or causing collision.

06:06

So here are the two paths.

06:08

If you want to see this simulated, we can select that setup, going simulation mode, and drag the cursor around the parts.

06:29

And this is how it looks like in 3D.

06:34

So you see all the tabs there and so on.

06:43

And the last thing to do probably is to generate NC code for these tool pads.

06:50

And I'm using here a specific post which is written for plasma cutter,

06:58

so it's a Torchmate 3 Mil/Plasma post and just create code for it.