- [Instructor] After you've done all your setup work,
you've opened the part you're going to machine,
you've defined your machine
that you're going to make the part with,
you've set up your tool crib,
you've gone in and defined your stock,
which we'll go ahead and do it again just for illustration.
Then it's time to really get into the business
of converting your solid works part
to machining instructions.
How we do that gets back to the basics
of creating the SolidWorks part in the first place.
Think about your base boss extrusion as your core element
onto which you've added other bosses, holes,
pockets, and slots.
This is the geometry that we're going to work with
and converting this CAD geometry
into CAM tool paths starts with telling SolidWorks CAM
which of those bosses, holes,
pockets, and slots are the features that require machining.
Since we created those geometries and SolidWorks
in the first place,
you'd think it would be easy for SolidWorks
to know what those features are and how to machine them.
And you would be right.
In most cases you can simply click
on the SolidWorks automatic feature recognition tool,
and it will pick out all the features of your part
and add them to the CAM feature tree shown here.
So let's go ahead and do that.
I'm going to click the extract machine
double features button,
and we're going to go ahead and automatically
take all of those features,
the face feature, the perimeter,
this cutout right here, and each of these drill holes.
SolidWorks automatically recognize them,
turned these features into CAM features,
listed them in our CAM feature tree,
and if this feature list looks good,
we could go ahead and take the next step
and generate our operation plan.
There's one catch, the SolidWorks
automatic feature recognition tool has a dialog box
which lets you select what kind of features
that it will recognize automatically.
You'd think that this dialog box would default
to having all the possible features recognized
and then let the user delete
or suppress any unnecessary features
that were automatically recognized
and added to the feature tree.
But it doesn't do this,
probably to keep the clutter down
if you're working on complex parts.
Let's take a look at that dialogue box.
You'll find it in the SolidWorks CAM options toolbar.
We'll go ahead and click on that
and it'll go to options, mill feature.
So here I've selected all of the types, holes, non holes,
boss face, part perimeter, tapered, and fileted,
I've allowed it to create feature groups
and we can check some of the options here
that will define which features are automatically detected.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave this as I've set it up
and click okay.
If you're using the automatic feature recognition
within SolidWorks CAM,
it's always a good idea to check this dialog box
and select whichever features you will want
that are not selected by default.
For example, if you want SolidWorks
to automatically detect the material stock
that you've defined,
you'll want to check the face and part perimeter check boxes.
If SolidWorks picks up some undesired features as a result
of the options you've selected,
you can always delete those features in the feature tree.