I’ll lay out my work process. I want to include facing as the first operation (as is tradition), and have the faced plane be my Z=0. if my target thickness is 1" but my stock material is 1.1753…whatever", i want to be able to set the Start Depth to the -0.2". as in start Above the workpiece and work down to the theoretical 0 plane, making it the new, real 0 plane at 1". does this make sense? in practice, keeping the Z=0 plane consistent across operations reduces human
is there a way to do this in Millmage that i’m not finding?
The final depth field in MillMage is a positive integer. However, if you read the GCode after saving, you’ll see that the values are indeed negative for Z depths.
As a machinist I totally understand the reasoning for wanting this, and we welcome any suggestions, like this one, over at MillMage.Fider.io - we do actually use Fider to pull feature requests into the queue - would you be willing to post on Fider so anyone else can vote it up as well?
Yeah, i knew depth is a positive integer, but the G-code coordinate output was in negative Z in the workpiece co-or. hence why i said negative start depth.
but i gotta say, currently, setting the 0-plane in the Project Setup as the highest point is a bit clunky. (even though manual tool change requires re-zeroing the new tool, but if i had an automatic tool changer, it would be more troublesome) I’m glad you understand what i’m getting at. it just helps keep the logic clear in the project so i can hand it off to someone else and they can make sense of it. I think i’ll set up a “reference block” for now. like a tool length probe, but for maintaining a planar 0 between tools.
I have been using the Feature Suggestions board liberally, and will gladly continue to do so. I do so, as well, with the understanding that some might be trivial, some might be much more complex than it might seem, or just time consuming to implement. I can only suggest/request things, i don’t know the ins and outs of the software code, nor your team structure/size, nor the queue priority. So even if I submit 100 suggestions, it’s not coming with expectations. outside of maybe some transparency and communication about it, but that already seems to be the case.
Top of material as Zzero is pretty common. But I see what you want: [1] Move to +Z 0.1753 and mill in steps to Z 0.0 as the final depth. [2] You now have Zzero at the top of the material.
I tried entering negative numbers to negate the Z- output (net +Z 0.1753), but it did not like that.
@wanderingtruckie has a solution, but I think it means also adjusting the final depth as well for all operations after the surfacing.
Like @Colin said, Fider the thing, post a link here, and I will vote for it. I think we should be able to start at any depth and not be limited to Zzero, or negative positions. In fact, this is why I initially struggled with MillMage in the beginning.
