Cutter

A tool is one entry in the project's tool house, identified by its T-number, and it is the whole assembly the spindle turns: a cutter, the holder it sits in, how far it stands out, and the sensor settings a smart holder needs. All of it is edited on the Tool House page, one tool at a time, with each part of the tool a node of that tool's Control Tree.

What each quantity means, and how to choose between the two ways of expressing a cutting envelope, is Cutter Geometry. This page is where they are entered.

Where it is

The Tool House page, at /tool-house, reached from the menu bar's Tool House switch. Four columns, left to right: the tool house and its tool list; the Control Tree of the tool picked in that list; the editor of the node picked in that tree; and a canvas drawing the tool. The header of the tool list trades the other three for a gallery of every tool drawn to scale. The tree's roots are the tool's own parts — General, Cutter, Holder, Clamping and Int. Holder — and the tool itself has no row, so the editor's header puts the tool first: Tool #1 / Cutter / Flute Profile.

The address is the selection: the tool number, then the node's path through that tool's tree, as in /tool-house/1/cutter/profile. The rows of the tool list are links that change the tool number and nothing else, so picking another tool keeps the node you were on, and a walk down the list stays on the same part of each tool. A tool that lacks that node — a third flute on a two-flute cutter — opens on the nearest node above it that it does have, and the deeper node comes back on the next tool that has it.

Tool 1 of a fifteen-tool demo house, at /tool-house/1/cutter/profile. The tool list carries one row per tool — its number badge and its note, or the derived abstract note where no note has been typed. In the tree, Cutter is unfolded to its sections and Flute Profile is selected, so the editor shows a Column APT profile with its diameter, length of cut and round radius.

The whole house to scale: the gallery

List and Gallery, in the header of the tool list, switch what stands beside the list. The gallery draws every tool of the house side by side, all to one millimetre scale, as a section seen from the side: the flute, the cutter body above it — its neck, taper and shank — and the holder, each in a colour of its own that the legend above the drawings names. A dashed line marks the holder nose, where the stick-out ends; a dash-dot line marks the spindle gauge line, where the tool meets the spindle; the grey lines count millimetres up from the tip. Under each drawing are the cutter's diameter and corner radius, its flute length, the stick-out, and the tool length from the gauge line to the tip. It is the page for checking a whole set of tool assumptions at a glance — which tool has a neck, how far each one stands out, how thick each holder is.

The drawings are made from the same geometry the canvas draws in 3D, placed the same way, so a flute profile, an upper beam, a holder or a stick-out changed in the list shows in the gallery as it does on the canvas. A holder or a cutter body given as a free-form mesh rather than a profile is drawn by its largest radius at each height, the outline it sweeps as it turns, with a step drawn level at its height. Zoom each scales every drawing to its own cutter, from the tip to a little above the holder nose, the holder cut off at the drawing's edges — for the small cutters that one common scale leaves a few pixels wide. No tool is drawn smaller than on the common scale. A tool with no cutter or holder yet, such as one New Tool has just added, shows a note saying so in place of a drawing.

Click a drawing to open that tool in the list, on the node you were last on. The view is part of the address — /tool-house/1?view=gallery — and the menu bar's Tool House switch reopens the view the page last showed in this browser: the gallery, or the list once a drawing or a row of the list has opened a tool. Going to another page and back finds the gallery as you left it, scrolled where it was. While the gallery is shown, the menu bar's buttons for the tree, editor and canvas columns are greyed out; the tool list's stays, and with the tool list hidden a List button at the left of the legend leads back to the list. The gallery only reads the tools, so it stays open while a program plays.

The fifteen-tool demo house in the gallery, at /tool-house/1?view=gallery. Tool 12 has a neck and a taper onto a 6 mm shank, as does tool 15 at the foot of the page; the others are straight shanks in short holders. Tool 1, the tool the list has open, is outlined.

The tool house is a file of its own

The list on the left is the project's tool house, and the Object Management (⋮) button beside New Tool manages the whole house rather than one tool — its file extension is .MachiningToolHouse. That is how a set of tools is reused: Save As writes the house out, and Load on another project installs it in place of whatever that project had. A shop that runs the same twenty tools across every job describes them once.

New Tool stays disabled until the project has a tool house at all; a project without one shows an empty-state block naming that button and the .MachiningToolHouse extension instead of the tool count. A house with no tools in it leaves the tree column empty except for a line saying no tool is selected.

While a program is playing, or paused, this page is read-only: a banner across the top says so, the editor column is dimmed, and New Tool and the Object Management menu are disabled — the run is cutting with the very tool you would be editing. Press Stop or Reset on the banner, the same two as on the Execution page, and the page opens up again.

Creating, duplicating and deleting a tool

There is no dialog to fill in first — a new tool arrives with default values and is then set up node by node.

Press New Tool. The tool takes the next number: one past the largest already in the house, or 1 in an empty one.
Select the tree's General node to give it its identity. Tool ID is the T-number, and committing a change there renames the tool. Note is yours to write; the read-only Abstract Note (auto) beneath it is derived from the cutter you give the tool in the next step, and carries a one-click copy button.
Duplicate and Delete are the two icon buttons at the top of the same editor. A duplicate is inserted at the first free number past both the tool it was copied from and the largest in the house, so it never lands on top of an existing tool.

A tool number cannot be repeated. Renaming a tool onto a number the house already holds is refused as a conflict rather than overwriting anything, so the way to swap two numbers is to move one of them out of the way first.

Tool 1's General node, at /tool-house/1 — an address that names a tool and no node opens on General. The Abstract Note below the editable note is derived from the cutter the tool carries rather than typed, which is why a tool with no note of its own still reads as something recognisable in the list on the left.

The Tool House page with General selected at the top of the Control Tree for tool 1 of fifteen, its editor headed Tool #1 / General showing Duplicate and Delete icon buttons beside the title, the Tool ID and Note fields, and a read-only Abstract Note (auto) describing the cutter with a copy button, and the cutter drawn on the canvas at the right

Giving it a cutter

The Cutter node chooses what kind of cutter the tool carries — Milling Cutter, Freeform Remover, or none — and holds the fields every cutter has: Shank Mass, Hone Radius and Relief Angle. Shank Mass opens as an estimate from the cutter's geometry and material, with a hint under the field saying so; a weight you type is kept through later edits, saves and reloads, and the button at the end of the field returns it to the estimate. While the Show Physics Options preference is on, Integral Mode sits above them: Solid End for a monolithic cutter, Insert End for one whose cutting edges are inserts.

The Object Management (⋮) button at the head of the Cutter node's editor works on the whole cutter, as the one beside New Tool works on the whole house. Load opens on the cutters HiNC ships, under Resource/Cutter, and puts the cutter of the picked .Cutter file on the tool in place of the one it had — or on a tool that had none; the tool's own holder and clamping stay as they were, and the canvas goes back to its home view to show the new cutter whole. The cutter is copied into the project with its materials, and the project keeps no link to the file, so a later edit or save never writes into it. A cutter file holds the cutter alone: the holder and Exposed Cutter Height are set on their own nodes. After a load the Material node's file field reads In the cutter itself (no file) above the grade's name, and a grade picked there afterwards takes its place. The load reports the same warnings about the materials' figures as a material picked on the Material node does. Save As writes the tool's cutter out as a .Cutter file for another project; a flute or shank material picked on the Material node is written beside it, in a <name>.Cutter-src folder the file refers to, so keep the folder with the file — loaded without it, the cutter comes in without that material. Copy, Paste and XML Mode work on the cutter as on the other objects — a cutter pasted from another tool becomes the tool's own copy, not one shared between the two. A file that holds anything but a cutter is refused, and the tool keeps the cutter it had.

A milling cutter grows its sections as child nodes of Cutter, and that is where the description proper is entered:

Node	What it holds
Insert	The inserts of an Insert End cutter: how many, the mass and thickness of one, and the total mass that follows from them. A solid-end cutter has no such node.
Material	The flute material, the shank material of an insert-end cutter — a solid-end cutter's shank is its flute material, so it has no separate setting — and the coating layers, numbered from the surface inward. An insert-end cutter's shank that holds no material and names no file — an older project's, or a cutter loaded without its `<name>.Cutter-src` folder — reads No shank material selected, and Clear sets the default, AlloySteel42CrMo; until then the tool's thermal step is skipped, with a `Tool-ShankMaterial--Missing` warning. A material whose thermal conductivity, density or specific heat is not a finite positive number, or lies outside the range of a solid, is loaded as written, with a warning that names the constant. An element the file lacks is not given and takes no default: the material is loaded all the same and named (`Material-ThermalConstants--NotGiven`), and the thermal model is skipped for the tool. A cutter material file without its hardness or wear-coefficient curve (`TemperatureVsHardnessCurve`, `TemperatureVsWearCoefficientCurve`) is loaded, selected and saved all the same and named (`Material-WearCurves--NotGiven`); the native thermal model does not run for a tool that carries it as its flute or a coating material. Such a tool, and one with a coating layer that holds no cutter or coating material, is named once as its steps play, as `tool [N]` or the currently equipped tool, and not again until a Reset (`Physics-Thermal--ModelUnavailable`); its temperatures and wear stay where its tool change, or the last step the model ran on, left them. The thermal model needs no coating layer: it computes the temperatures and wear of an uncoated cutter, insert-end or solid-end.
Flute Profile	The cutting-edge envelope, as one of the five APT types: General, Ball, Column, Cone and Taper.
Flute Contours	The fluting: how many flutes, where each sits on the cutter body, and its side and bottom contour — see below.
Inner Beam	The equivalent solid core inside the flute: a radius ratio set by the flute count, a constant ratio, or a spun profile. The yielding stress ratio, the cutter deflection, the shank-mass estimate and the shank thermal model read it; it does not change the cut shape.
Upper Beam	The shank above the flute, as a geometry — a cylindroid, or an extended cylinder whose bottom follows the flute, among others.
Optimization	The per-cutter limits the optimizer respects.

Insert, Material, Inner Beam and Optimization are in the tree only while Show Physics Options is on, so with that preference off the cutter's sections start at Flute Profile. See Preferences, which also says what an address naming one of them opens while they are hidden.

Flute Contours is a small tree of its own. The node picks the fluting type — Uniform, where every flute shares one baseline contour, or Free, where each flute carries its own — and grows one child for it. Uniform Fluting holds the flute count and grows a single Baseline Contour; Free Fluting adds flutes one at a time and grows Flute 1, Flute 2 and so on. Each contour node holds its Flute Offset Angle, where that flute sits on the cutter body, and grows a Side Contour — constant helix or freeform — and a Bottom Contour — slide or freeform — beneath it. A single flute's side contour is therefore an address of its own: /tool-house/1/cutter/contours/fluting/flute-0/side, the flutes numbered from 0 in the address and from 1 in the tree.

Holding it, and how far it stands out

Three more nodes carry the rest of the tool.

Holder picks the holder kind — none, a Cylindroid Holder, or a Freeform Holder — and holds the holder's own Name and Note, with a read-only Abstract Note between them. A cylindroid holder grows Geometry and Resolution beneath it: the holder's Z-against-radius profile, and how finely it is meshed for display and collision. The profile starts at the holder's nose (Z = 0), the end the cutter is clamped in, and ends at the spindle gauge line, so its last Z is the holder's gauge length. A newly chosen cylindroid holder is a placeholder — a Ø6 cylinder from Z = 40 to Z = 80 — so every row is replaced with the holder's own profile rather than added after it. How the profile and the stick-out make up the tool length is Cutter Geometry.

A freeform holder is a geometry rather than a profile. It grows Geometry — a box, a cylindroid, an STL file, a transformed geometry or a combination of them — then Geom To Spindle and Geom To Cutter, the two placements that put that geometry against the spindle mount and against the cutter mount, then Resolution.

The library's Holder folder, under the Resource root of the File Explorer, keeps holder profiles as .Holder files, each a list of (Z,R) pairs in the same frame. The Holder node has no button that loads one: its pairs are typed into the Geometry table, or, over the HTTP API, written whole onto the holder's profile — the call sequence is in Cutter Geometry.

Clamping carries three numbers, two of which are really one. Exposed Cutter Height is how far the cutter stands out below the face it is clamped in — the holder's nose, or the spindle gauge line when the tool has no holder. Preserved Distance is the gap between the top of the flute and that same face (the field's label calls it the spindle nose). They differ by the flute height, so editing either one moves the other, and the panel says so. A new tool starts with an exposed cutter height of 0, the whole cutter hidden inside the holder, so the stick-out is always entered from the tool sheet. The CWE panel of the Execution page draws the cutter without its holder and marks the part above the exposed cutter height in magenta, the shank as a solid and the flutes as lines — see Inspecting a Step.

Setup Angle, below them, is tied to neither: how far the cutter is turned in the holder about the tool axis, in degrees. It starts at 0, which is where it stays for a tool clamped without regard to where its flutes point. Only the milling physics reads it, placing every flute at this angle on top of the flute's own offset angle on the cutter body; the drawing on the right is not turned by it, so nothing on the canvas confirms what is typed here. It matters most for a smart holder, whose measured moments are read in the sensor's own frame — Smart Tool Holder says how to arrive at the angle, including estimating it from a recording instead of measuring it.

Tool 1's Clamping node, at /tool-house/1/clamping. The two coupled fields read 28 mm and 8 mm, the line beneath them states the relation the server keeps between them, and Setup Angle stands under that line on its own.

Int. Holder is the smart holder's Observation Location: which anchor the sensor reading is referenced to — none, the tool tip, the holder anchor or the spindle mount — then the height above that anchor, positive toward the spindle. The Equipment and Execution canvases mark that point with a green ring sized from the tool's outline at that height, drawn only while Show Physics Options is on. The holder anchor is the holder's nose, and a new tool starts there at a height of 0, so a smart holder needs its sensor height entered before its moments mean anything. The node is in the tree only while Show Physics Options is on, because nothing but the physics reads it. Which anchor to choose, and what a wrong height does to the results, is Smart Tool Holder.

Two shapes this screen cannot draw the numbers for

The Freeform Remover cutter has no editor on this page. A tool that already carries one — loaded with a tool house or a project — shows it on the Cutter node, with a note naming where that shape can be edited instead; no other tool can be switched to it here, and switching such a tool to Milling Cutter or None asks first, because its model is discarded. So do a Load, a Paste and an XML Mode Apply of the node's Object Management menu over it; Cancel keeps the Freeform Remover. The custom spinning profile is the other: the Flute Profile node offers the five APT types and nothing else, although the Inner Beam node does take a spun profile for the core.

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