Mirroring on jobs using Rest Material calculation with lock toolpath feature

[Hervé Philibien]

Our customers expect from us, more and more automation and simplification of CAM programming.

Our last versions bring very powerful feature for this :
-Rest material options in some 2.5D jobs
-Rest material options in iMachining 2D

Meanwhile our customer in aeronautical and automotive field, needs mirror feature for Left / right part (very common situation).
Here again we bring a very powerful in our last version with mirror option.

But today (SC 2021) we can't apply mirroring option on jobs that use rest material option.

Customers and I understand the reason for this. If you use mirror you are not anymore working on rest material... It's kind of incompatible feature. Either you are mirrored (fixed toolpath), either you work on rest material.

But then, in SC 2021 came AGAIN (what a wonderful CAM solution ) a very powerful feature:
-Supress&Lock feature

So it means now that we are able to lock a toolpath to make it independent to rest material AFTER having calculated it from rest material.

So what could be done is lock toolpath + applying a mirror on the locked toolpath when we try to make a mirroring on a job that works on rest material.

By this way it would bring solution to such case without any compromise.

[[email protected]]

Thank you Hervé for this very important and informative post, that highlights again the power of SolidCAM!