Operations - Contour Milling

Contour milling involves the steps described below. If it follows insulation milling or drilling operations, some steps might be omitted.

Placing PCB laminate on the machine bed

As instructed, put PCB laminate and spacer on the machine bed. You can use Manual control popup to move the machine’s head out of the way.

Inserting cutting tool

As instructed by the application, insert the tool you will be using to mill traces in your machine’s spindle.

Milling

The screen shows PCB outline and all contour mill tool paths extracted from gerber files.

You can also select, which tool paths are going to be milled. Tool paths can be selected with mouse. Selected tool paths can be enabled and disabled with toolbar buttons or with keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+E (or Cmd-E on Mac OS X) to enable, and Ctrl+D (or Cmd+D) to disable. Shortcut Ctrl+A (Cmd+A) selects all tool paths.

For your convenience offsets that were entered on previous steps can be checked (and should it be necessary edited) in Offsets popover. The same way all of the relevant settings can be accessed and changed in Settings popover.

If you wish to have a look at G-Code that will be send to the machine, you can press a Wrench button in the toolbar.

When you are happy with all of the settings, press Run button. cirQWizard will send generated G-Code to the machine.