In this lesson, we'll control the lead and lag of a tool. After completing this lesson, you'll be able to modify a multi-axis contour to change the tool forward tilt, the tool sideways tilt, and identify the multi-axis contour tool parameters and what they change. In Fusion 360, we're going to carry on with our multi-axis contour. We want to begin by editing the multi-axis contour operation and move on to the passes section, first, modifying the forward tilt angle. Right now this is set to zero degrees and we're going to increase it to 15 degrees and then simply say, okay, and simulate this operation. Notice that it's giving us a warning. It's telling us that the lead radius has been decreased to avoid a gauge. Since we're not saving this operation, that doesn't necessarily matter, we simply want to see what the operation looks like. I'm going to slow this down and I'm going to play through so we can watch what the tool is doing. If we view this from the top, you can see that the tool is tilted 15 degrees toward the direction of travel. If we go back into our parameters, if we go back to that angle, and in this case, we change it to negative 15 degrees, we'll allow it to regenerate the operation and then we'll resimulate it. We should see that instead of leading the direction of travel at 15 degrees, that the tool is now tilting away from the direction of travel. This is not an ideal situation because essentially what we're doing is we're pushing the tool into the geometry that we're trying to cut. But that's the difference between the 15 degrees on the forward tilt in the positive direction, or a negative 15 degrees on the forward tilt, which puts it in the negative direction, or in this case, pushing the tool into the part. Let's set that back to zero and let's change the sideways tilt. In this case, I'm going to set the sideways tilt at 25 degrees. I'm going to move over to either a front or a side view. We can already see that the tool is angled pretty far when we're just looking at it from the side. I'm going to slow down the playback and I'm going to allow the tool to go in and begin machining. One thing you'll notice is it stays perfectly in line in that forward tilt orientation. But now instead of being exactly in-between those two angles at 45 degrees, we've now added an additional 25 degrees, tilting the tool that much further. If we once again go back and edit the operation and we change that to a negative value, what we'll see is the tool is going to be more upright. It's going to stand closer to vertical. That way we can again have the tool orientation be relative to the geometry or the contour we selected in a specific orientation that makes sense for whatever we're machining. If we wanted it to stand completely straight upright, that would essentially be us using a 2D contour operation or an engraved mill operation, allowing it to simply follow along that. But let's make a few more adjustments to make sure that we understand these values. I'm going to go back to my passes. I'm going to reset that sideways tilt to zero degrees. Right now the axial offset value is zero. I'm going to set this to a rather large value at 0.125 and just take a look at where the tool is actually going. Once the operation is generated, let's go ahead and take a look at the results. We change that axial offset to 0.125. Instead of playing through, I'm just going to manually move through the operation. You can see that it's 0.125 away from the contour, but it's not vertical or horizontal, it's axial, meaning along the direction of the tool. This is a way that we can move the tool away that specific amount based on the orientation of a tool. If we enter a negative value here minus 0.125 and recalculate, we'll see that the tool orientation again is dictated by those lead and lag angles. But if we try to simulate this and we manually drag the tool around to those specific positions, you'll notice that the tool is not an eighth of an inch inside of the part. It didn't violate the coordinates or it didn't violate the contour that we selected. Having that axial offset value at a negative didn't actually allow it to go into the part. There's also this tangental fragment distance option. This will change whether or not it can extend past a certain value. It doesn't really affect us because we have a closed contour here. But the axial offset value didn't respect the positive and negatives, similar to how the tilt did. There is also a pass overlap and this allows us to start and end at a different position. This can be extremely helpful if you want to just go past the starting position slightly so that way you're not entering and exiting at the same point, potentially leaving a small deformation. In this case, it's starting right in this corner. As we work our way around the part, you can see that it's going through the part how it normally would, but at the end, it's actually going past where we started by whatever amount we entered, in this case, half an inch. It starts here and it works its way around and it exits here. There are many other settings that we could play with. Of course, we're only taking a look at this in a two-and-a-half axis situation. We are controlling the tilt, the lead, and the lag of the tool, but we aren't really looking at this in a multi-axis scenario. The last thing that I want to do is I want to change whether or not the tool is left or right. Then I'm going to increase that axial offset again, just to take a look at what happens because it's going to be good for us to understand exactly what happens when we change any of these settings. We'll simulate this. Again, note that that axial offset, again, it's based on the tool angle and it's simply putting the tool well above the part. It's just offsetting that curve to the left of the right based on our settings, and the axial offset is just putting it well up into the air. Right now let's go back into the multi-axis contour and let's reset all of those parameters back to exactly how they were when we created the operation. We're going to do more work with this multi-axis contour by taking a look at other areas on the design that are not just simple two-and-a-half axis. But we want to make sure that we do save this before we move on to the next step.
