In the Tools menu, under Helpers, you find the Corner Fillet or Chamfer tool.
This tool is made to make it easy for you to calculate chamfers and fillets at corners. Of course, you could draw the contour in SimCam and have it calculate the chamfers or fillets for you, but when programming manually, sometimes you just want help to calculate a thing or two without having to draw anything. This is where the Helpers come in handy!
Consider the drawing below. Its M-shaped contour has some corner radius that is not very well defined. We know more about the corners they round off than about the arcs themselves. Let us use the tool to calculate them.
Start with a blank CNC program. Create a workpiece with the dimensions of X84, Y88, and Z20 (this tutorial is using millimeters).
Click on the "Insert at cursor" button to insert the workpiece call into your program.
Now, get a tool and position it at X0, Y0, and Z22. Type in the following blocks.
Time to lower the tool to Z15.
Simulate the program.
Good! Now, let us solve the contour using the corner tool.
Click Tools- Helpers - Corner Fillet or Chamfer
Look at the drawing. We are at position 1 located at X0, Y0 and we want to solve the first arc (R5).
Position two is at X14 (84/2 - 56/2) and Y88.
Position three is at X42 (84/2) and Y41.
Let us key in these values in the Corner tool.
As soon as you have entered all values the tool will show you the blocks to create these moves.
Click the "Insert at cursor" button to copy the blocks to your program.
Simulate the program.
The first corner solved, two more to go!
If you look at the drawing, we have actually moved a bit too far as we are now at position 3. We fix that by deleting the last block. Then we simulate again.
That is better, we can now continue with the second arc.
Open the Corner tool again.
As you can see, the tool automatically fills in point one with the current tool position. This is why we suggest you simulate to the start position before opening the tool.
This time we have X42, Y41 as point two and X70, Y88 as point 3. Let’s fill them in.
Again, click the "Insert at cursor" button and simulate the program.
As before, we are now a bit too far as the tool is at position 3. Delete the last block and re-simulate.
Once again open the Corner tool and fill out the final coordinates. The first one will be filled out automatically as before.
Click "Insert at cursor".
Add the block G01 X0 to end the contour.
That is all! Simulate the program and make sure you get the desired contour.
