In today's QuickTip, we will show you how you can influence the behavior of your part boundaries in a Planar Mill operation. You can extend, trim or add an additional stock to these in Siemens NX. Part Boundaries are in fact an important factor in CAM manufacturing, as they define the limits of the workpiece and thus influence the behavior of the toolpaths.
Change Part Boundaries in NX CAM
NX CAM QuickTip | Extend or Trim Member
Alexandra DeYoung | 
Planar Mill Operation
In today's example, we want to move along the edge of our workpiece with a Planar Mill operation. We select "mill_planar" as the type and "Planar Mill" as the operation subtype. We have already selected the tool, program structure, etc.
In the operation settings we change the cutting pattern to "Profile". In the Part Boundaries dialog we make some more settings (selection method, tool side, boundary type...). We also mark the relevant curves, which the tool should manufacture and specify the floor geometry.
Now we have our toolpath.
Change Part Boundaries
When we place our tool at our frontmost starting point, we see that the operation starts right at the center of the tool. The same is true for the end of our tool path. We would now like to change this.
We would like our tool to start a little earlier in front of the workpiece and depart a little before the end of the workpiece.
In this video our NX CAM-Expert Alexandra DeYoung will show you, how to do this practically in Siemens NX.
Each step explained
We go back to part boundaries in the menu.
In the list under "Elements" we see the individual members of our selected curves. Visually, the members are represented by small arrows on our workpiece. We can easily select the members by clicking on them in the list or by clicking on the arrows on our workpiece.
Extend or Trim Members
We can trim or extend the selected members in NX CAM. To do this, we click on the "Extend/Trim Element" icon.
In the opening dialog, we see the current length. We can easily change this value by entering a new value. Or we can drag the small point on the displayed line on our workpiece and drag our curve to the desired length.
In exactly the same way, we can also simply shorten the paths by reducing the value or manually pushing the curve shorter.
Add a Stock
We can also manipulate the member in the center. We select one of the middle members and then click on "Custom element data". Here we give the member a stock with it.
Thanks to NX CAM, we have the ability to completely customize the part boundaries so that the operation does exactly what we need for our manufacturing.
Alexandra DeYoungJunior CAX Consultant
E-Mail: alexandra@amscollective.com
Author of this Article
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