Re: anyone using Surfcam Velocity ? comment please...

I cant comment directly on Sufcam's claims, but we have developed a
system, called "Adaptive Clearing" that gives you a very similar
toolpath to
this velocity truemill thing.
Look it up on http://www.freesteel.co.uk and http://www.cimco-hsm.com

The idea behind it is that the cutter engagement is never exceeding a
limit that you set when calculating the toolpath.
Cutter engagement is the area of the cutter removing stock at a given
time. Conventionally the cutter engagement can fluctuate between 'cut
taken at full width' of the cutter
and no engagement at all. As a result you have to be conservative with
feedrate and spindle speed, to allow for the worst case of these full
width cuts, in order not to break the tool

In our method, the "Adaptive Clearing", you can use a higher
feedrate/spindle speed, according to the maximum cutter engagement you
allow, which the toolpath is guaranteed to stay below. I suspect
Truemill will be similar. Other benefits include an extended tool life
and less wear on the machine.

We had our method shown on a 3 axis machine
(http://www.ops-ingersoll.de/index.php?content=produkte_show&cat=1), in
Germany at the beginning of December on the trade show Euromold. They
roughed out a block of aluminium with 8 times the feedrate as they
would use with the standard roughing method as offered in Mastercam.

Here some techincal data of a toolpath they ran in hardened steel:
Cutter: 10mm diam, 0.5mm corner radius
Spindle speed 8000 1/min
Feedrate 8000mm/min
Cutter engagement <= 0.6 mm
Material: Steel 1.276 7 HRC 54

You can test our method online, upload an STL file and then download a
G-code file with a toolpath.
Have a look on our website:
http://www.freesteel.co.uk/cgi-bin/adaptiverough.py

Martin