The roughing module, which is designed for fast, reliable machining, includes cycles for milling spiral and trochoidal tool paths. According to Open Mind Technologies, five-axis helical drilling uses standard cutters to open large areas prior to roughing and uses a five-axis helical tool path to efficiently remove material and evacuate chips. The performance package of the HyperMill Maxx Machining offers three modules for drilling, roughing and finishing that are designed to help users achieve optimal rates of machining productivity. All toolpaths generate fully automatically with collision checking and avoidance. Users can choose between five-axis machining with a fixed tool angle, automatic indexing or true simultaneous machining. The HyperMill CAM software suite includes a wide range of powerful five-axis strategies designed for machining challenging geometries, free-form surfaces and deep cavities at maximum efficiency levels. HyperMill CAM software includes support for five-axis cavity milling.

We have never needed to make manual edits to make the programs run properly,” he says.

“Open Mind Technologies postprocessing is clean and accurate. A high-precision surface module, which enables him to mill fine surface finishes, and advanced part probing cycles for the Heidenhain Control have also enhanced Katrov’s operation. One such feature is five-axis helical drilling, which enables him to use regular end mills to helically drill large holes at high feed rates.

In addition to tangent plane machining, Katrov also relies on other HyperMill features for time and tooling cost savings. “And there are times when this tangent milling with barrel cutters feature provides the only way to effectively machine the required shape of a customer’s part,” he says. Utilizing tangent milling with barrel cutter strategies from the HyperMill Maxx Machining performance package has enabled the shop to manufacture very complex components with standard tooling, which has reduced cycle times by as much as 70%, Katrov says.

Hypermill vs mastercam