Webinar: ESPRIT EDGE Tips & Best Practices

June 29, 2026 / Josh Averbeck

This webinar walks through programming a Swiss-type lathe in ESPRIT EDGE, covering machine setup with mounting blocks and fixtures, feature creation and recognition, simultaneous multi-channel machining with sync points, and machining pattern codes like G610, G620, and G650 for a Citizen L20E.

  • 00:04 Hello everyone, and welcome to this webinar on Mastering Swiss Machining with Esprit Edge. My name is Benjamin Wright, and today I will be guiding you through a
  • 00:14 few topics regarding Swiss Machining that you may not be familiar with, even if you've used Esprit Edge for other kinds of machines.
  • 00:23 We're going to start today by creating a machine setup to go through and program a part with. So to start, I will come up on a blank template to the
  • 00:34 Home tab of the ribbon and click Machine Setup. And for this example, I will be using an L series Citizen
  • 00:42 machine. When we load that machine in, we'll see that there is machine definition, but we don't have a lot of what we're used to seeing with
  • 00:53 other kinds of machines. We don't have the tool stations necessarily set here. So we will get to that in a moment. But first, what I'm going to do is get my
  • 01:03 fixtures set up, so a guide bushing and some collets on the spindles before we leave this machine setup environment.
  • 01:11 We'll come up and I'll add a fixture. I'll make sure that I'm selecting the Syncom L20E. Add Fixture, and I'll start with a collet.
  • 01:22 I'll make sure that my mounting point is the main spindle. And we now have a collet in there. I'll come back and re-click on the machine
  • 01:33 and repeat that process for the sub-spindle. I'll make sure that it says sub-spindle adapter there, and then we can check and make sure that that looks good.
  • 01:47 So now what we're going to do is come back to the machine again, add a fixture, and add our guide bushing.
  • 01:57 So now we have our three fixtures in here that we need. I'll go ahead and click OK to confirm those changes.
  • 02:06 And now in our Project Manager window over here under the Tool Assemblies, and I can see I have my gang,
  • 02:14 my opposite post, and my back post. So I'm going to start by building out my gang. And what we're going to do here is use each of these stations,
  • 02:24 and we're going to add mounting blocks onto them. And these files that I'll be adding are typically found on the
  • 02:31 machine page with your digital packages. And so if I click that button, I can go into my L20E and
  • 02:39 there's this mounting blocks. That's the zip file that I downloaded with machine definition. And then it's got, for each of those three
  • 02:51 areas of the machine, it has a folder. So I'll start with the gang here. On station one that I've
  • 02:57 selected, I'm going to be loading in the GTF 3612. So I'll find that one here. And you can see this has our
  • 03:09 gang turning tools located on it. I'll just click OK there for the time being. I'll come down to station seven, right-click and add a mounting block again.
  • 03:20 This time I'm going to be adding the U35B, which has some of our milling stations and the station where we can load on the B axis head.
  • 03:35 Now we're starting to look a little bit more familiar with how the machine is set up. I'm going to go through now and I'm going to add to this
  • 03:45 U35B on station seven, eight, and nine. We want to add the GSC 1310. So I'll get one in there.
  • 03:59 Then what I'm going to do, instead of going through that whole process, I'm just going to right-click on this mounting block and copy it.
  • 04:05 Then I can right-click on each of the next stations and load that on. So now I've got a copy of those, on those three stations.
  • 04:17 So now I'm going to come down to station 11, which is for the B axis here, and I'm going to load in
  • 04:27 the GSE 3210. Go GSE 3210. That looks about right. And when this loads in, it's going to be at the B0
  • 04:39 orientation, where it's pointing with the Z. What I'm going to do is I'm going to rotate that negative 90 in the Z axis.
  • 04:51 This is a manual B axis. It's not automatic. And so now I've got that set up, so it's going to be doing crosswork
  • 05:02 if the tool sticks straight out. Click OK to confirm that. And that should be pretty much our setup for the gang.
  • 05:11 What I will do is I'll add a couple of things to this B axis here. And the things I'm going to add are a GSE 3707
  • 05:25 and on station 13, I will add the GSE 4007. Now we'll be using these five stations here based on that B.
  • 05:44 And there is our gang. So we'll get to adding some tools to it later, but first I'm going to build out this opposite post or
  • 05:52 the sub-spindle post. So I'm going to add a mounting block there. And then here I'm going to go back and we're going to look at this
  • 06:03 opposite post. And the first thing we're going to add is the U128B, which will hold all of these stations we need.
  • 06:15 And then on here, all I'm going to add is for stations 22 and 23, I'm going to add the GDS210.
  • 06:28 And again, I can take that mounting block, copy it, and paste it over into station 23. We've got those two now.
  • 06:38 Lastly, I'm going to focus on my back post. So station 31, I'm going to add a mounting block here.
  • 06:47 I'll come back to my back post folder, and I'm going to add the U155B for those stations. Now on here, I'm going to do stations 35 through
  • 07:01 37, and we're going to be adding the GDS210 to these as well. We'll quickly copy that over to the other two.
  • 07:18 There we go. So now we have this set up, and this should be exactly what we are looking for.
  • 07:26 As far as our mounting blocks are concerned, now all we need to do is get some tools added in to complete our machine definition.
  • 07:35 So what I'll do now, I'm just going to click up at the top of my gang, or I could even try closing these and just click off in
  • 07:43 space. And what I want to do is come to my tooling, and I'm going to add from my tool manager. You could open tools if you have a tool list
  • 07:53 saved as an individual file. But if you saved them to a knowledge base, the tool manager, like I have here,
  • 08:03 you should be able to select all of these tools and click Add Selected Tools. We'll give it a second to think here.
  • 08:14 And then we can close that. Now, most of our tools should come in pretty well here. So we've got these three that
  • 08:22 look good. Got these over here that look pretty good. But what we have on the gang is jumbled around a little bit, and this could be from saving out the
  • 08:35 tools from other locations in another machine or a different setup of the same machine. But what I can do is
  • 08:44 I can come in and kind of move these around pretty easily. So I'm going to drag down my paper end mill to station seven here, and that pops it right
  • 08:55 over. This gang back drill. I think we're going to pull this one down to, see here, probably 52R1 is where we're going to do it.
  • 09:11 The cutoff that's down here, I'm going to drag that one up to station one. Then my front turning tool, I'll drag up to station
  • 09:25 two. Back turn, we'll go to station three. Got a threading tool I'll put on station four. And lastly, a custom knurling tool
  • 09:40 on station five. Now we can look here. We've got all of those looking good. So the last tools we need are
  • 09:52 like this ball mill will need to come up. And I think, yeah, I've got this front drill that's in station eight.
  • 09:59 We're going to move that one. I'm going to put that on 12R1 here. And then I can drag up this ball mill
  • 10:11 into its spot on station eight. Then I've got this gang spot drill. I'm going to put it on probably this 13R1.
  • 10:26 So now we should have all of our tools mounted. We don't have any left that are unmounted. That looks good.
  • 10:34 And everything seems to be in place now. So with our tools set, our machine setup is ready to welcome the part that we're going to load in.
  • 10:47 So let's go ahead and we'll come to our part view of the Esprit, and I'm going to come over to File and I'm going to
  • 10:55 import this file. So we'll come just to our desktop. I have a cross piece shaft that we're going to load in here.
  • 11:09 And we can run CAD diagnostics if we want to on it. It'll just let us know if there are faults in the solid.
  • 11:18 So here we are. We've got this set up. We've got a few different features on this. And so what we'll do to start is we've got this loaded in.
  • 11:32 I should have had the button checked to have this loaded in as a part. We're going to check that. We'll come over to our part setup.
  • 11:42 And I'll come in. I can see that it highlights when I click on the work piece or the part, and I have that solid loaded in the geometry.
  • 11:50 But if you don't have that selected, then you can just come in here, click the geometry box, and select your solid.
  • 12:00 And now it will be recognized. So now we'll go ahead and we can create some stock for this. I'll create a bar
  • 12:08 stock. I'll start out by auto-sizing it, so it's perfectly to size, matching the max diameter of our part. I'm going to change the strategy here to align it to the top.
  • 12:22 And this allows me to put a margin on the front for the amount I want to face off. We're going to start up here with the outside diameter.
  • 12:31 I'm going to do a three-quarters inch stock on this. Inside diameter, because of the hole we have on the
  • 12:39 front, most likely, it's giving us an inside diameter to the stock, making it a tube stock. I'm just going to zero that out so
  • 12:47 it's a solid bar. Then the height we're going to give it here is going to be something like 10
  • 12:54 inches. I just like to give a lot on the back, so that way, our main spindle can hold on back here,
  • 13:00 and it can push enough through the guide bushing that we can machine this whole part. The top margin for here, I'm just going to put something like 10
  • 13:10 thousandths. So we'll just do a little bit to face off. With that, we have our part set up there.
  • 13:19 Now I can come and add that to our machine setup. So we'll come back in here to machine setup. We have our collets.
  • 13:28 I'm just going to click the main spindle collet and add the work piece, and it's important that you add it to the main spindle, not
  • 13:35 the guide bushing, otherwise it won't let you machine as you would like. So it looks like it's pretty close to where I would want it to be.
  • 13:47 Let's see, if I change my view over here of the stock, then we can see there. This should be enough. It should be able to reach.
  • 13:58 If you have a very specific number in mind of how far past it needs to be, because I think the zero...
  • 14:07 If we put zero in here and we turn off. So this, the zero's going to be right at the face of our
  • 14:16 fixture. And so what we want is to make sure we have enough length, and as you know your machines, you will be able to
  • 14:25 make the correct judgment call on whether you need to change things there or not. I'll just keep the default number it throws in for
  • 14:33 me. So I'll come in here, add the work piece, and there I get a 7.67 number. I could probably do something like eight inches if I wanted to.
  • 14:46 And it's as easy as just changing that Z translation. So we'll click Okay here. We have this G54 that was
  • 14:54 created for us. I can use my machine axes later to pull this through, but it'll be just on the front face of
  • 15:01 the part. Yeah, if we pull this through here, it would be not on the front face of the stock, but on the front face of our part
  • 15:12 there, is our G54 or our work offset. So now we've got our part added in here, and we should be
  • 15:22 able to move on to adding features. So I'm going to come to my Features tab here, so I can create using all of
  • 15:33 these tools. But before we start creating some, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to File, Options. And this is a tip if you use some of the more
  • 15:44 automated feature functions. Coming to Features and checking your part tolerance and arc approximation here. This can make a big difference because at 10,000ths, our
  • 15:57 part would be too small. It wouldn't catch all the features as we need to create them. So I'll add an extra zero in there, go to one thou.
  • 16:08 We could even go tighter if we felt we really needed to. And I'll take this down to one thou.
  • 16:19 There, I've updated my tolerances. So now when I come in and I create some turning features here. Down the bottom left, it says to select my solid or face.
  • 16:33 So I'll select the solid there. Select my Z-axis as the turning axis. And it'll take a second thinking about that before it pulls up a little window
  • 16:45 for us. Here we go. This we can use to choose what we want, what kind of features we want it to create, front or back,
  • 16:57 contours, grooves, OD, ID, faces. I'm going to leave that all on, and I will just click Okay. You'll see it creates a bunch of different
  • 17:12 features here. And so I'm going to look here and it's trying to get some of these grooves, but we're going to machine this spiral a different way.
  • 17:25 So I'm going to delete both of those. This OD groove. And come over. So it's going to pick up this one here. That one I'll keep.
  • 17:35 We've got a back face contour. And I'm just going to do this with the cutoff operation. So I'm going to go ahead and delete that.
  • 17:47 The back ID, I'm going to delete because we're going to finish this just with a drill, will be enough.
  • 17:54 Back OD contour I don't need, because I'm going to do all the OD on the main spindle and then just get this
  • 18:02 chamfer in the cutoff. Now we've got the front face. And this one I will hold on to. Front ID I won't need because, again, I'm going to do just drilling
  • 18:16 directly on there. And we've got the front OD contour. So this one comes most of the way down across it here. I could recreate this feature
  • 18:31 to include that extra little bit, or when I create the turning operation, I could just extend it out to
  • 18:39 come past that. But now what we might want to do, we have our three features here. We'll create a few more turning features.
  • 18:46 And to do that, I'm going to use the turning profile here. I'm going to select my solid, go to Turning
  • 18:54 Profile. And here I'm going to make sure my solid is selected, that I have it set to Create Geometry and have a reasonable part
  • 19:04 tolerance and arc approximation on here. And then I can hit OK. And now when I hide my solid, I should see a pretty accurate
  • 19:18 geometry that follows the tolerance I asked for. Now for this, what I'm going to do is, when I look at my front OD contour,
  • 19:28 it's going all the way back here. What I'm going to want is to split this up into two sections. The first one to come past this
  • 19:37 edge here so that I can just get the milling on the front, get that groove before I go back and take the rest of that OD.
  • 19:47 So what we'll do is, I'm going to play with a few things here because I don't like the idea of this geometry coming down in for the
  • 19:59 OD either. And so I need to extend a line. So the element we're going to extend is here, and we're going to extend it
  • 20:15 to an element, or maybe... See, we can do by length, I think. And we'll just take it at least to this edge, so then we can cut
  • 20:26 it right here. So where it comes past, that'll work just fine. I'll just come and trim off this extra bit.
  • 20:37 All right, so now we have geometry that comes across here. And then I'm just going to... Let's see. Here we go.
  • 20:48 Going to split this line right where that line appears. And let's do just a point maybe on that end so we
  • 21:00 have something we can grab onto when we split it. Now we should have a line here. That doesn't look as good as I would
  • 21:10 like. So if that's not working out, what I'll do is I will just delete these two segments that were imperfect.
  • 21:20 Just going to delete this point two most likely, and I'll just create a segment for each of those sections, and that way we have an exact representation
  • 21:31 of what we need. So now I can take the front edge here and these segments along with this one
  • 21:47 up to there, and then I can create a chain from this. All right, and I'm going to rename this as, we'll just say,
  • 22:01 OD1. What we'll call it, and I'll reverse that so it's going front to back. Then I can come in
  • 22:11 here and take the rest of this OD. So I'll hold Control for both of those, Control+Shift and click in between to
  • 22:18 propagate all the way through. And then I can auto-chain that. Again, it needs reversed, and I'll name this OD2.
  • 22:31 All right. So we've got the ODs there. I'll come in and select my individual segments for this groove, and I'll name this OD
  • 22:52 Groove. Now we've got a lot of what we need with the turning. The last thing I really need is a cut off feature.
  • 23:03 So I'm going to actually bring my solid back here, and I'm going to create a point from geometry. Just snap it to the center of the back face, which is easy since
  • 23:17 we have a nice circle on the edges there. And then I can create a segment that goes from this top corner here down to
  • 23:27 this center line. So now I can use this segment and this segment, auto-chain them. This way, I get a good
  • 23:45 cut off feature. All right. So we're looking pretty good on our features. So let's take a look at creating some of our holes and then our milling
  • 24:03 features. So we'll go ahead and we'll come to the Hole Feature Recognition, and I'm just going to select this front face here.
  • 24:14 Max diameter and min diameter are definitely giving me a broad range, and it's going to search on that face for any hole.
  • 24:22 So I'll just let it fly And here we got one of our holes. That's perfect. I'm going to come back to my standard XYZ work plane here, just so
  • 24:35 our axes look correct. Now we'll do another hole recognition on the back face, and I'm just going to make
  • 24:43 sure active work plane only is set to No, since our Z is pointing in the opposite direction that we would want for the hole.
  • 24:53 Go. And I'm just going to rename this from Simple Hole to Back Hole there, and we'll do Front Hole on this one.
  • 25:11 All right. There's our holes. Now let's look at any milling operations we need to do on this. We're going to do these slots here,
  • 25:19 these gear teeth. And we're going to do this spiral on the back. And so what I'm going to do is,
  • 25:30 we have the face split right down the middle here, which is nice. If we hadn't had that, we could use a tool on our modeling
  • 25:40 toolbar to split those faces for us, and we could go just halfway on the parametric curve of that face and
  • 25:49 tell it which direction, and then it would split that for us. But I'll go ahead and I'll auto chain that one.
  • 25:58 Check the direction of it here. It looks like it's going from the back to the front. I'm going to reverse that.
  • 26:09 And that way, we would start here and go back on it there. I'll name this one Spiral. Now what we need is
  • 26:22 on our teeth up here, the same kind of thing. If it hadn't been done for us, we could split the faces here,
  • 26:31 and we just need to auto chain. The first two is what I'm going to do. And we want them to be going opposite directions.
  • 26:43 So this first one goes down, and then the second one will come back, and we'll just run right on center with our tool.
  • 26:52 So I'm going to call this one Forth. It's going forth to cut. And this one is Back, so it's going back and forth.
  • 27:07 So now, we should have our features ready to go. And so now all we need to do is add our
  • 27:16 process files to this. So I'm going to make this a little more quick and easy than if we manually programmed
  • 27:26 each operation. So we're just going to start creating some operations with some pre-created process files. So I'll start off with our front face contour here.
  • 27:38 I'm going to right click on that and Open Process. And I'll select my process for the front facing. Give that a minute.
  • 27:57 And we'll see there's an error about the work piece having too low of clearance, basically. We're not staying outside of the clearance range, and
  • 28:11 so it's throwing a little bit of a fit. And I can see it's not really liking this here. So let's see what this looks like in simulation and just take a look.
  • 28:38 All right. So that looks good. And then the problem here is it's coming way out far before coming back.
  • 28:51 So I don't really like that, that large movement it's doing. What I might do is just rebuild all here and see what happens.
  • 29:01 Let's also try, we can change some of our clearance values.
  • 29:16 All right. We can change the work piece as well. All right. Now we can see we've got check marks here, which is
  • 29:27 good. You can see it's updated this stock now, so it was just maybe a calculative error bringing the process file in. Maybe there were some
  • 29:39 logic that was held back that it saved but was not necessary, and so when we updated a few things, then it refreshes that
  • 29:47 calculation and looks better. All right. This front OD feature, we don't need that. We recreated those features, so I'm going to delete that one out,
  • 29:59 and I'm just going to go to my OD one. Can open a process here. Let's see. Rough OD one, or we could drill the front first.
  • 30:15 Either way kind of works. Maybe we'll go ahead and we'll do the front hole first. I think that would be a more proper process.
  • 30:25 It's drilling the front And then what we need to do is come in here. I'm going to change out the tool we're using here.
  • 30:42 And for now, I'm going to use this gang front drill, which will move it to channel one, and it should look much better.
  • 30:54 Now I can go ahead and do that OD1, and we'll see if there are things that need changed or if it looks good.
  • 31:07 All right. So we're going to come in. For OD1, we're just going to come into turning, and instead of using a
  • 31:14 pre-created, we'll come in and take a look at feature here. I'm going to default all. Go rough OD1, and we'll use our front turn tool.
  • 31:34 Just throw some feeds and speeds in there. We're doing the OD. I'm going to add a slight start extension, so it's not right on the edge when it
  • 31:46 starts. And for the end extension, let's do maybe 50 thou. We don't need to do any undercutting on this.
  • 32:00 We should be able to let automation do its work. And let's go ahead and remove that much. See how this looks.
  • 32:15 There we go. So with the automation, it's calculating automatically how much needs to be removed or where it needs to start its
  • 32:22 passes and removes pass by pass by how deep you say it can go. How deep it can go. And now we can see kind of where we sit with this.
  • 32:37 So now that we've got this OD turned down, we can go ahead and do our slots. And then we'll come back, and we'll do the groove after that.
  • 32:50 So I'll come back, come over here, my fourth feature. Open a process. Slot fourth. All right. We'll look here, and the error it's showing me is that it can't reach the
  • 33:09 orientation. So knowing this tells me that if I look in my properties under Machining, the work plane I'm looking at here is
  • 33:19 the XYZ work plane. And so if I look, that means that the Z of the milling tool will be coming in the turning plane.
  • 33:31 But that's not what I need here. What I need is a YZX for this one. And then if we rebuild this, we should see it build
  • 33:44 properly. There we go. And then what we can do is, we're going to need the same kind of deal for our
  • 33:58 back feature because it's going to be on that turning plane as well. But we don't really have a work plane built for us yet.
  • 34:09 So what I'm going to do is create a new work plane. I know that there are 20 gear teeth on here.
  • 34:15 So what I'm going to do is modify work plane. We'll rotate UVW, and then this is going to be not in the U.
  • 34:28 So I'll put in zero for the U rotation. The V translation is what we want to change. It's the one sticking out here.
  • 34:37 And we're going to be going based on the right-hand rule. We'll be going negative. So I'll put in negative,
  • 34:46 and we'll go three sixty over twenty. And then I'll put in zero for the W, and that should line us up perfectly with that tooth.
  • 35:03 Looks good. So now I can go ahead and save this plane. We'll just call it plane two. And then this back,
  • 35:16 I can change to plane two. So now when I come in and I open a process for the back
  • 35:23 slot, we get it looking pretty nice. Now we can see here it's basically plunging straight into this groove material,
  • 35:42 and maybe we won't like that. Maybe we want to put the groove before these after all. But we can change that after we've created it.
  • 35:52 So what I'm going to do now is create the rest of these slots. So what I'm going to do is just select the two operations that I've added.
  • 36:04 Right-click and copy. I'm going to rotate, copy, and we're going to do that nine times. We've got two of them,
  • 36:14 so we need 18 more. Two times nine is 18, so we're good there. It'll automatically rotate the correct number of degrees for us.
  • 36:24 And then I'm going to uncheck this box so I can make sure that it gets the right axis to rotate about.
  • 36:34 And then it will create all of those for us We've got a bunch of these now, and our features are not looking terribly organized.
  • 36:52 So what we might do is, I might select all of these back features and create a feature set for them.
  • 37:08 Yeah, and it grabbed all the fourth as well, huh? I'll just call this back and forth. So now we're looking good there.
  • 37:24 And then we just need to double-check the order of the operations, but we will get to that after we've finished programming so we can optimize the
  • 37:33 order there. So now we'll go ahead, we'll take care of this groove. We'll come in here. I will add a process,
  • 37:47 and we're going to do this OD groove. All right. And we look pretty good there. So next, what we can do is take our OD two,
  • 38:03 turn the rest of the OD down so it's nice and ready. We'll open that process. Still got check marks all the way down there.
  • 38:19 Looking pretty good. So now we've turned it down all the way. All we really have left is we have the spiral, the cut off,
  • 38:33 and the back drill, other than the machine operations like the pickup and a park. So I'll go ahead and
  • 38:45 we'll do this spiral first. What I'm going to do for this is I'm actually going to create a freeform feature where I can select
  • 38:59 all of these faces. And the upper radius of this is not as critical. It's just the radius down in that we need to worry about.
  • 39:12 So I'll just create it like this. And this one is on work plane two, I notice. I'm going to actually change that.
  • 39:25 See, was it our YZX plane? Fits a little bit better with that feature. And then I'm going to open my process for the spiral.
  • 39:48 With this one, we're probably going to get, yep, an error here. That's probably because there's a reference to a drive profile which is specific to the
  • 40:00 part. And so here it's picking up a feature that is not the one I want to use. What I want is
  • 40:09 the spiral feature that I created earlier. So I'll select that one and click OK, and that should update everything that we
  • 40:20 need. So here it's going to be able to follow and spiral around that part. So now we should be looking good there.
  • 40:36 With that done, we should be able to start with a park and then a pickup. I'm going to come over to turning. I'll create
  • 40:49 a park cycle. And I have some settings in here from previously, but just to make sure I'm using the settings I want, I'll open and
  • 41:01 grab my park for pickup. Make sure that it has the settings that I actually want. We're good there. And then we'll do the same thing with our pickup.
  • 41:17 Come in here, and it may be correct settings in here, but we could say if it's defaulted, we'll just open our pickup,
  • 41:30 and everything should be set correctly there. So with our pickup done, now we can do our cutoff. So now I'm going to come in here, cutoff feature.
  • 41:45 I'll right-click, Open Process. We'll do our cutoff here. Here we go. So far, so good. We can see the part transfers here to the sub-spindle.
  • 42:06 And then all we need to do is our back hole here. So I'm going to go ahead and load that one in.
  • 42:16 And then we can take a look at our operations and machining patterns here. All right. So everything looks to be decent at this
  • 42:27 point. We at least have green checks, but we can go and simulate through our part and just see how it's
  • 42:34 looking. So I've got the drill back selected there. Want to make sure that I click off of anything like that.
  • 42:46 Here we go. Now I can start it up
  • 42:58 There we have a drill going. This will do the roughing.
  • 43:14 That's about what this looks like. So it's going in an opposite direction at this point. I'm not a huge fan of that. We'll play with the order of those
  • 43:25 later. This here, we might want a higher clearance.
  • 43:44 And then we're going to go through and get the second OD turned. Here comes our ball mill. We'll slow this down just to take a look at it.
  • 44:02 And that's cutting beautifully.
  • 44:17 All right. Now we've got an optional stop command that paused my simulation. I've got my stop code checked there.
  • 44:29 Click play on that. That's going to feed on for this pickup. Then it gets the cutoff there. Now we've got a part violation. I think this is just going to be
  • 44:53 that the tip of the tool is going in a little bit further than what the bottom of our feature says.
  • 45:09 That's not too big of a deal. That's an easy change in the operation we can make here. If I can come in
  • 45:19 on the hole. Tip included, we're going to say yes, and that'll fix that. The other thing we needed was just on the groove.
  • 45:34 You put a higher clearance in here as it comes in. Let's do, let's see, a clearance of maybe 100
  • 45:51 thou. So we should be about good there. Now let's look at our operation organization. So if I look at
  • 46:06 how all of these go, let's turn off some of our visibility here. We're just seeing one operation at a time.
  • 46:16 So we got the first two, and then the last two, and the second to last two, and then the third to last two, and so on and so forth.
  • 46:26 So what I might do is just drag these ones to the bottom. Drag these ones next to bottom. And I could do this the whole time if I wanted to.
  • 46:42 Another thing I could try is selecting these operations and using the optimized program. And then I could see if
  • 46:56 it optimizes each of them or not. And it doesn't look like it's quite getting that. So we'll go ahead and we'll just stick to our
  • 47:08 process before. We'll take these ones up here. These ones will come here. That's good.
  • 47:44 That one should go there. Comes here, I believe. Let's see. We've got this one, second, third, fourth. Okay. So this one should go down somewhere here,
  • 48:11 probably between those. So that one goes... That one should come up here a bit. There we go. So now it comes across.
  • 48:37 Little bit of a process here.
  • 48:52 Move it up something like this
  • 49:07 Get rid of that.
  • 49:21 Okay. So we're pretty much good on that second half. Move those two. All right. We should be about set now.
  • 49:42 That looks good. So now they're all in order, so our rotations will be sequential. So now we've got some of this set up, but
  • 49:55 some of it's not as optimized as I would like it to be. So, what I want to do is,
  • 50:03 I want to set up some syncs and do some machining patterns here that are going to help us do things more simultaneously.
  • 50:14 So after this front facing, I will have a sync. After the drill front, I will have a sync. And then we'll come down here.
  • 50:32 After the part for pickup, we already have a sync built in, and that's because we have something in channel two, so to keep it sequential, it
  • 50:40 automatically syncs that up for us. And then what we're going to want is, let's see, probably down here after that link,
  • 50:53 post transfer, then we'll have another sync. So now what we're going to do is set up some of the machining patterns that we need
  • 51:02 here. So what I'm going to do is, after this front facing, we're going to change. Come in here, right-click on the sync and apply machining
  • 51:15 pattern. We're going to set this to a G six 20. And so what we're going to do here is...
  • 51:25 Let's see. Let's include this rough OD one. And I think we should be able to change those. Just have the
  • 51:45 rough OD one there. And let's keep a sync here. So now we'll take a look at this sync, and it's saying, oh, it's beyond the
  • 52:01 axis limits. We'll say, okay, for a G six 20, that may be. What if we did something like a G six 10?
  • 52:13 Then it's going to be perfectly fine. What we would need to do is change this tool, because a G six 10
  • 52:19 is just going to be single machining. And so that would be the proper process for this. But then if we wanted to do a G six 20,
  • 52:29 which if we hover over this, it says inner/outer diameter, simultaneous machining. So that would be drilling the center and working on the
  • 52:37 OD at the same time would fall under this category. If we want to do that, I'm going to want to change this operation.
  • 52:48 And right now we're using a tool from the gang, which the OD is also using a tool from the gang, so we wouldn't be able to
  • 52:55 simultaneously do that. But if I come and use the sub-front drill, then we'll be using the sub-spindle to go in at the same time that
  • 53:07 the gang is doing the OD, and that would work. And then I'm going to change this to channel two.
  • 53:18 And I'm going to delete this sync between them that it automatically creates. And then I will apply my G six 20.
  • 53:27 So now it can do this simultaneously, and it will superimpose the axes so that as we go through, it should look good. Let's go ahead and
  • 53:39 just simulate that out so you can see what it looks like. All right. So we'll start out. We have our
  • 53:47 facing. All right. Now it starts on that OD section. And as it runs the OD, it's getting a little hard to see.
  • 54:16 Maybe we can turn off some of our machine stuff here. As it starts to turn that OD, then it's also superimposing
  • 54:29 and doing the Z-axis of that drill at the same time. And so that's able to function correctly in simulation and outputs the correct code
  • 54:40 because we use these machining patterns. And so everything looks pretty good there. The only thing is we're still in this G six 20,
  • 54:51 and so this sync that comes afterwards, we're going to want to apply a machining pattern and just go back to a default mode of G 600 here,
  • 55:00 and that will bring it back to how it should be for the slots there. Then we can come to the syncs down here.
  • 55:09 And down here, what we're going to look at is for the pickup and cutoff, we're going to want a G650.
  • 55:18 We hover over that, it'll tell us it's a pickoff center support machining pattern. So I'm going to select that one,
  • 55:28 and everything should build nicely, as it should. This sync between the pickup and cutoff is just a sync since they're on different
  • 55:36 channels, and so we can leave that as is. And then the sync that comes after the transfer, we're going to apply a G600 to bring it back
  • 55:49 to the standard machining pattern. So machining patterns can be used. You can hover over them, as I showed you,
  • 56:00 to see what kind of machining they're used for, front-back parallel or front-back simultaneous. And based off of that, you can set the operations with the
  • 56:13 correct tool in the correct channel based off of how it's going to output in your code. If the output is going to be coming out in channel two at all, then it would need to
  • 56:23 be in channel two. If all of it comes out in channel one, then both operations would be listed in channel one.
  • 56:30 You can also come in and you can edit the machining patterns, and so you can put in text and comments here. You can
  • 56:38 give a Z argument here of something like negative 10. And so you can set all of that in here and have it output in the
  • 56:47 code. And if it starts to get a little hairy and you're not sure what you need to change, you can always just reset the machining pattern, and it'll go back to a standard
  • 56:57 sync. So you can use those at will with Swiss machines. The codes will change based on who the machine tool builder is,
  • 57:12 but you should be able to hover over them either way just to see what the codes for your specific machine are and how you can utilize them.
  • 57:22 So I hope this was helpful to you all. I appreciate your time and wish you the best of luck with your Swiss
  • 57:27 machining.

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