I am working on a way to do double sided milling without using dowels. In the Fusion Manufacture environment, I use ‘arrange’ to lay my model components down in preparation for milling. In ‘arrange’ I set up an ‘envelope’ that is slightly larger than the room I need for all my components. I then use an oversized piece of stock on the mill. The very first operation I need to do is to have the mill cut one axis, either x or y, to be exactly the size of the ‘envelope’.
Problem is, Fusion shows me the ‘envelop’ while I use the ‘arrange’ function but once I try to set up tool paths, this envelope goes away and I can’t perform a machining operation on it. Is there any (reasonable) way of doing a profile cut of the edge of the envelope as part of my machining operations?
I have come up with a way but it is immensely cumbersome and error prone and am wondering if maybe I am missing something. The only other thing I have come up with is to cut stock to the size specified when doing the envelope setup in a completely separate Fusion project before I load the gcode file for the actual project. In other words load a gcode file to cut the stock to the required size, run the file, load the gcode for the actual project that I need to cut and then run all my tool paths from this second gcode file.
In case anybody is curious why I want to do this …. if I have the mill cut my blank stock to the exact size that Fusion is expecting on at least one axis, if the work piece is registered against a fixed edge on x and y, I can cut side one and just flip the part to cut side two. No dowels required. The ‘arranged’ parts are cut out half way with a profile operation during side one operations and then cut out all the way after the side two operations have been done. At this point I have a bunch of parts that can all be double sided while using a single piece of stock and no dowels required.
