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This or That: Drill Vs. Advanced Drill

This or That: Drill Vs. Advanced Drill

Should you use the Drill or Advanced Drill toolpath? It depends on if your part needs a speedy solution, or a solution with more power. 

By John Stauffer and Callie Morgan
Wednesday, March 30th, 2022, 3:30 PM PDT

 

Drill Toolpath

Drill is a toolpath that allows you to create any standard drilling cycle, such as a no-peck approach, pecking, chip breaking, or any other standard type. It also includes dwells, options for custom parameters, and the ability to program simple 3-axis drilling all the way up to 5-axis drilling all within one interface.

The Cut Parameters menu in the Drill toolpath in Mastercam 2021.
The Cut Parameters menu in the Drill toolpath allow you to choose between different standard cycle options.

This toolpath is also capable of reading solid model history and can be applied to the entire hole or a specific portion(s) of a hole. The Drill toolpath outputs standard drill cycles in the form of a g-code cycle, such as G81 (for Fanuc control systems).

 

Advanced Drill Part 2 Lesson Screenshot from Streamingteacher
In Backplot, these two toolpaths appear the same, but Advanced Drill will give you more settings options to use within the same hole. Screenshot from lesson "Advanced Drill Part 2" in the Mastercam 2022 library

 

Advanced Drill

Advanced Drill does everything that the standard Drill does and more. The main advantage of Advanced Drill is the ability to change the speed, feed, cycle type, coolant, and more within the same hole. This is particularly helpful if you are drilling very deep holes that need special considerations, such as a low-speed entry/exit or different peck depths, depending on how deep the tool is in the hole. This is also helpful for situations where you are drilling through a void. You can speed up the feed rate and turn off chip-break or pecking during the void section to reduce cycle times. 

Advanced Drill gives you full power over the toolpath, such as feeds, speeds, cycle type coolant and more.

Advanced Drill outputs long-hand code for each section of the hole. This increases code density compared to the standard Drill cycle, but it also removes the need for hand edits or custom drill cycles to be added to your post.

 

When to Use Drill vs. Advanced Drill?

Use Drill any time that a single strategy or drill cycle would efficiently complete your operation. It has enough power to get you through your operations without much hassle. Drill is easier to set up, therefore taking less time to program. 

Use Advanced Drill when a standard drill cycle would not be sufficient to cut the hole, such as needing special considerations for entry/exit, a change in peck depths within the hole, or a change of any speed or feed within the hole. Another reason would be if you need to hand-edit your code or need added customization to your post to get your desired result.

Video lessons on both of these toolpaths can be found in our Hole Making toolpaths lesson group here: Mastercam 2022 Library - Spot Drill & Drilling (streamingteacher.com)

If you would like to learn more about drilling in general, watch our Drill Theory presentation! In that presentation, we get into the specifics of everything related to drilling. Our guest host Russ Johnson brings his years of experience to the table to help you better understand the process and considerations of drilling. You can watch this presentation anytime with a Pro account on our Presentations page.

 

For access to more in-depth Mastercam training content, sign up for a Streamingteacher account here!


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