INNOVATION IN WOODWORKING INDUSTRY AND ENGINEERING DESIGN, 1/2019 (15): 37–46 TOOLPATH GENERATION AND OPTIMIZATION OF MACHINING OF PINE WOOD SURFACES Athanasios Makris, Ioannis Ntintakis Technological Educational Institute (T.E.I.) of Thessaly, Greece e-mail: amakris@teilar.gr; ntintakis@teilar.gr ABSTRACT In this paper are presented methods for wood working milling machining, specially we are going to use samples of pine wood. In the beginning a sculpture surfaces will be designed in a CAD/CAM software Fusion 360 and tool paths will be generated using four different strategies for finishing stage, these are: a) parallel, b) scallop, c) radial and d) pencil. On the upper ma- chining surface of the final physical parts we measure the roughness in order to check the pro- duced quality for each strategy. Each strategy compared according the total machining time, the cutting conditions and the geometric accuracy. Physical models will be produced with the use of a rapid prototyping machine ROLAND MDX- 40A for evaluation and tool path compar- ison. Key words: CNC, wood machining, tool path, CAD/CAM, milling, optimization, pine wood. INTRODUCTION Since 1954 when the first milling ma- chine tool could be controlled numerically (NC), thereby representing one of the great- est industrial advances of the twentieth cen- tury. Nowadays advanced CAD/CAM sys- tems offer a number of functionalities with a broad range of operations and upgrades which contribute to machining quality in CNC (Computer Numerical Control) ma- chines. The strengths of CNC machines can be utilized in the processing of complex paths and consequently the creation of complicated tool paths. In the last decades milling has im- proved significantly. Most of innovations in- volve new clamps, machine functionality and improvement in the cutting tool performance. The main goal of all these improvements is the reduction of production cost without af- fecting the quality of produced surface. Advanced CAD/CAM programs offer a majority of improvements in order to pro- duce the machining surface. In this paper we are going to compare different milling tech- niques which focus in finishing stage. Broadly, sculptured surface machining is done in two stages, 1. roughing and 2. finish- ing. The majority of the material is removed in the roughing stage using larger tool(s) while the left over material is removed in the finishing stage (Misra et al. 2003). Therefore, generating the optimum cutting parameters is crucial to obtain high productivity in the manufacturing process of complex geome- tries and to reach the desired tolerance values (Gok et al.2017). Most of the available CAD- CAM systems often do not generate optimum tool path in CNC operations (Mwinuka et al. 2015). Thus many experiments and settings have to be implemented in the tool path gen- eration process in order to achieve the opti- mum results in the machining area. The se- lection of the appropriate tools and tool paths directly depends upon the shape, the material and the precision of the object to be machined (Saglio et al. 1994). In experimental stage we are going to use Fusion 360 CAD/CAM software which is