Automatic Facing button on CutControl

Has anyone used this option yet? The button is just below the tool setter button.

I used it once so far. Most of it made sense, but I didn’t quite understand what “Stock offset” meant.

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Yes, I used it quite a few times when I was dialing in the tram of the spindle w/ the fly cutter on some test pieces. I ran automatic facing in the Y direction and then the X & adjusted shims to remove any step and result in seeing witness marks “both ways” from the cutter.

Had no issues with the parameters of the automatic facing menu & seemed to be fairly straight-forwad.

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It says it ia a G54 based operation but it is lifting the spindle from zero on start for test paths I have tried with no tool.

Wanting to start from the back left corner and it’s first move is to try move to the left from the start. Been trying different work offsets to include zero.

I’ve ran this on a G55 or G56 offset, but there are some quirks that can bite you if you’re not paying attention. We’ll need Langmuir to look into this further since I don’t believe this would be intended operation of CutControl.

In this example, I have a vise setup @ G54 and a lathe chuck setup at G55, with G56 being the back left corner of the lathe chuck.

  • Switch to G56, for example, to set your WCS zero (I want to run everything off G56 in this case)
  • Go to the Automatic Facing Routine in CutControl (says for G56)
  • Setup your cut information & click save
  • When you get back to the main screen, it defaults back to G54 (I do not believe it should change your WCS here). If you do not manually select G56 again, the routine will head to the G54 based origin (I didn’t catch this right away and luckily didn’t break a tool since it dove the Z down).
  • If you select G56, the display updates showing proper G56 offsets, then you can run the facing routine.

You can use the graphic display window to verify your tool is in the correct area relative to your chosen WCS, but just take a second look to ensure it’s actually using the right G5x system.

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