Using a Cutting Tool as a Virtual Spindle Tool

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Using a Cutting Tool as a Virtual Spindle Tool

Often it is wanted to quickly blow holes in a plate, where the hole quality is not critical, as for example in Pre-Piercing for plasma on moderate thickness plate.

 

How then can you apply a Cutting Tool such as plasma to a point or circle, or pre-pierce? Answer: You can't!

However you can create a Spindle Tool in PrimeCut which calls up the plasma and uses it for point operations like a regular Spindle Tool.

 

In Touchcut , the Plasma tool needs a path to follow.  A simple pierce with no path will result in an error.  However we can create a very very short path, say 0.01mm for it to follow.

 

 

Here is a virtual spindle tool called Plasma Prepierce:

virtualspindletool

 

The key settings here are the Tool Start Codes, commented here for clarity (Like a normal spindle, no tool off codes are needed)

M30                        (Tool on)

G1X0.01                (move a fraction in X)

M3                        (Turn off)        

G0X-0.01                (Rapid back to where we started)

 

These setting work for a controller running in Incremental mode.  If running in Absolute mode, we need a couple more codes to put it into Incremental and back again.  This is safer as it will work in Incremental or Absolute modes:

 

$INC_MODE:ON$                (Activate Incremental Mode temporarily)

M30                                (Tool on)

G1X0.01                        (move a fraction in X)

M3                                (Turn off)        

G0X-0.01                        (Rapid back to where we started)

$INC_MODE:DEFAULT$        (Restore the program normal Incremental mode, on or off)