Hi

New user here and I just found this thread.

Very nice work and ambitious,just some off my head questions.

So if I understand correctly you reverse engineered via 3d scanning a model 21 action, imported those files into BobCad, tweaked them into a parametric model, and am using the CAM capability in BobCad to generate and post the G code which your trying to cleanup?

If I have that somewhat correct, what mill and controller?

My reason for asking is that the "post process" where the generic tool path code is tailored for the machine controller can be buggy/problematic.

If the simulator IS the mill controller vs an external controller that may help, but if you using a simulator outside of the mill motion controller that simulator has to know intimate details of the target controller, which if it is a old mill may be hard to get correct.

I would suggest getting some acrylic plastic and testing on that prior to tool touching those beautiful partial receivers.

Do you or the owner of the mill know GCode? or are you tweaking the cam generation process to fix tool path issues? Gcode is pretty simple, and if you have any programming experience you can learn the basics pretty easily:

http://www.cnccookbook.com/CCCNCGCodeCourse.htm

Bob who owns that site has done a good job on his tutorials.

You can do a LOT with good fixtures, several zeroing points for the main features of the receiver and hand crafted G code for one offs/small runs.

Creating a parametric model is VERY useful at this stage but if your churning mill time because of buggy G code consider moving up to a better CAM package or coding by hand.

I am glad to help in anyway I can on this, I am going down a similar path but your WAY ahead of me at this point,I am still doing tradeoff designs of my fixtures, tooling and indexing.

BTW:I do not own a CAM package mostly because all I do is one offs for my own business am able to get by with simple hand generated Gcode and macros/functions which I verify in my machine controller, then I cut either air or acrylic prior to steel.

Best Regards
Al