Good morning/afternoon,
I am learning Solidworks/Mastercam at the moment switching from Fusion 360. I had a really good understanding on the Fusion 360 side with the WCS, model and stock differences.
My confusion comes in when watching the programming the Titan 1M in Mastercam when setting the wcs to the back left top corner Nicole mentions to offset x+ 0.05 and Y- 0.05. I see this is where the solid model lives and I also understand Z does not need an offset because of the 2D face operation taking place before.
So my question is if using 3D tool paths in Mastercam I need to create a solid model to use as stock and always offset my x,y,z based on where the model lives within that stock? If using 2D tool paths then the stock does not need to be created?
I have the Titan 1M programmed in Mastercam and I’m about to head out to the machine. All I have to do is probe my part on the back left, top correct? I hope these questions make sense. I’m just used to F360
Thanks
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This might be a little late but the WCS represents where your Part is. Setting up the stock model is also important because if you use something like Optirough without a stock model to reference, although you’ll get a part, it’ll do a lot of excess moving and think that the stock is everywhere instead of a confined location. You can look at it by turning of rest material in optirough and restimulating it, it makes a huge difference.
When setting up the part on a CNC, you are going to want to move you coordinates to what you are programming. If you followed the tutorial, you should move your offsets according to what you moved the WCS Gnoman. It should also say what to move it by on the bottom of the setup sheet.
I hope this helps!
Indeed it does help. I thought Mastercam knows where my part is inside of this stock and .05 needs to be removed. I guess I’m used to Fusion 360 where I was setting a “stock box point” for my wcs and Fusion did the rest.
So when using a stock model I should always set my wcs to the actual part then probe the stock and adjust from there? I think I’ll get the hang of this once I go out to the machine and do a few parts. Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, this was part of the reason why the building blocks were made this way, nice round numbers that you can adjust. It’s a lot easier to understand this way.
When you start doing more advanced parts, I’d start venturing into making the center top of the part your WCS this’ll help you out a ton, it’ll make it so that way your part is centered with your stock so you won’t have a saw cut on the edge, and you don’t have to do the adjusting either. It’s also what happens on 5th axis parts so implementing it early on is good practice.
If you’re doing fixturing then it’s kind of the same but also different. I don’t want to say what to do for them because there is a lot when using fixtures and it takes so experimenting on what you feel comfortable with. Either making your fixture your WCS or each part a different WCS, if that makes sense.
Understood and thank you for the extra clarification. I was really comfortable in fusion making my fixtures, setting my wcs to a machine feature on the fixture, flipping parts, importing vises to set as fixtures and it seems like I’ll be hitting the reset button while learning SL/MC. I’m struggling atm wrapping my head around this why I’m having to manually offset things. I can’t imagine the confusion when it comes to making a fixture and setting my part on top of that etc etc…
At this point I’d be willing to find someone to teach this because I want to learn the right way instead of wasting time.