Takshak CAM

What Takshak is

• Automatic feature recognition — machinable features come out of the solid itself, grouped by role. No hand-placing every operation.
• True B-rep, and mesh supported too — pick faces, edges and vertices on the real model; fillets, chamfers, contours and manual chains work off the actual geometry. A mesh has no faces to pick, so recognition and face selection need a solid — meshes import for manual operations. Picked faces and edges stay with the operation after it runs — change the selection and regenerate.
• A complete 3-axis library — drilling and boring, facing, pocketing, adaptive high-speed clearing, profiling, engraving and V-carving, thread milling, T-slots and dovetails.
• 3D finishing — parallel, constant-scallop, Z-level waterline, pencil and 3D trace, with true flat, ball, bull-nose and tapered-ball tool contact.
• 4-axis rotary, three contexts — lock the axis and run any 3-axis operation on the exposed face; keep A turning for the turn-like and wrapping ops; or couple X, Y, Z and A on every cutting move.
• Collision-certified rotary finishing — Contour, Parallel and the Geodesic Finish are each checked against the whole solid, and what cannot be cleared is trimmed and reported. Never a silent gouge.
• Verified before you cut — the 3D and rotary paths are checked for collisions, and the whole cut plays back with the tool and its holder travelling the emitted motion, before a line is posted.
• Forty-three built-in post-processors — twenty-two controller dialects across metric and inch: Fanuc, Haas, Mazak, Siemens, Heidenhain, Okuma, Brother, Doosan and more, down to Mach3, LinuxCNC, GRBL, ShopBot and Carvera — with a machine library and a post-processor utility to edit a built-in post or author your own.
• Tool and material libraries — fourteen tool types seeded with 151 cutters, and feeds and speeds derived from carbide and HSS surface speeds and a chip-load curve — a starting value, never an override.
• Nesting and rescaling — many copies or many parts on one plate with a single change per tool, and unit mismatches caught on import.
• Your geometry stays on your machine — no cloud, no telemetry; after a one-time activation Takshak works offline, and the daily version check can be switched off.
• Yours to own — a one-time perpetual license, updated until the next major version, movable to another machine whenever you need it.

A full operation library

Holes & cone cavities

• Drill — peck-drills one or many identical holes on centreline in a single op, with chip-clearing pecks and an optional dwell.
• Bore — helically interpolates an endmill to open a hole to a target diameter wider than the cutter, with multi-pass moat clearing.
• Helical Ramp — spirals a standard endmill down a conical wall: countersinks, chamfered mouths, tapered seats.
• V-bit Plunge — forms the whole cone in one matched-angle plunge.

Faces, pockets & roughing

• Face — clears a flat top to depth, climb or conventional, plunge or helical entry.
• Pocket — clears a closed pocket to its floor with wall stock-to-leave and an optional finish pass.
• Adaptive Clear — constant-engagement high-speed roughing — deep cuts, gentle on the tool.
• 3D Pocket Clearing — clears a 3D cavity to its floor, whole-part or inside a region you pick, with rest mode for the follow-up tool.
• Ramp Pocket & Ramp Finish — ramped pit clearing plus a dedicated finishing pass on its walls.
• Plug Clear & Plug Finish — clears the air around a standing plug or boss, straight or drafted walls, island-aware, then finishes the drafted face.
• Sloped Pocket — pockets with a sloped, non-flat floor.
• Ramp — a ramped entry pass over the whole part or a chain you pick.

Profiles & contours

• Contour / Inside Contour — profile milling outside or inside a boundary, with lead-in/out and multiple passes.
• Arc Contour / Inside Arc Contour — arc-fitted profiles for smooth G2/G3 walls instead of faceted line segments, outside or in.
• Silhouette Contour — contours the part's projected outer outline, derived from the tessellation, so it works on a mesh as readily as on a solid.
• Open & manual chains — follow an open edge or a chain you pick by hand.

3D finishing

• Parallel — parallel-pass finishing across a 3D surface, whole-part or selected region, with true flat/ball/bull/tapered-ball contact.
• Scallop — constant-scallop finishing that holds an even cusp height across curvature.
• Z-level finishing — constant-Z waterline passes that finish steep walls level by level, whole-part or over a selected region.
• Pencil — cleans the internal corners a bigger finishing tool couldn't reach.
• Trace — 3D curve-follow along an edge or picked chain.

Engraving

• Centerline engraving — the tool tip rides each picked edge chain at the depth you set; line width follows the V angle and tip flat.
• V Carve — follows the medial axis of a closed region at varying depth, so corners come out sharp. Pick letter faces and the outline and its islands come with them.

Fillets & chamfers

• Fillet (form or mill) — round an edge to a radius, formed by a matching tool or milled with a ball.
• Chamfer & V-groove (form or mill) — bevel an edge or cut a V-groove, formed by a chamfer/V tool or milled.

Thread milling

• Thread Mill — internal and external threads by helical interpolation, with a size dropdown and automatic internal/external detection from the picked face.

Slotting & undercuts

• T-Slot — disc-cutter undercut: pick the slot floor and Takshak cuts the tee into a pre-cut vertical slot, neck clearance checked.
• Dovetail — the angled-flank sibling, cut with a dovetail disc from the same pick.

4-axis rotary, done properly

Takshak drives a single rotary A-axis through three contexts, named on screen exactly as they are here. Add Index locks the axis at any angle and hands you the entire 3-axis library above for the exposed face — an indexed context is 3-axis at an angle, so nothing is held back. Rotary keeps A turning through the cut, for the turn-like and wrapping operations. True 4 Axis is the pick-driven simultaneous set, where X, Y, Z and A move together on every cutting move.

Rotary operations

• Rotary drilling & boring — radial holes on the part.
• Rotary facing, grooving & OD steps — turn-like facing, grooves, and stepped diameters.
• Rotary roughing — cylinder roughing, adaptive high-speed clearing, and level clearing on rotary stock; Adaptive and Level Rough run in rest mode too, cutting only where the earlier tool could not reach.
• Rotary clearing — slot, pocket, and feature clearing around recognized features.
• Eccentric journals — crank-pin machining: bay clearing around the orbiting pin, then an orbital turn finish with coupled Y-Z-A motion.
• Rotary fillet & chamfer — continuous-A finishing of the transition fillets and bevels where a journal meets a shoulder.
• Face finishing — flank-finishes the transverse faces: web cheeks and annular shoulders.
• Wrapped 2D — wrap a contour or pocket around the cylinder.
• Contour — radius-level conforming finish passes, the rotary counterpart of 3-axis Z-Level, pairing with Level Rough. True 4-axis — detailed below.
• Parallel & Pencil — finishing passes on the rotary surface; Parallel takes stock-to-leave for a semi-finish pass.
• Geodesic Finish — scallop geodesic contours driven across the flank itself, leaning the tool to reach it. True 4-axis — detailed below.
• Region scoping — Parallel, Pencil, Adaptive and Level Rough each run whole-part or confined to faces you pick.

True 4 Axis

Two operations couple X, Y, Z and A on every move, and they come at a blade from opposite directions. Contour slices the part with cylinders about the rotary axis and walks the conforming iso-line at each descending radius — the rotary answer to a 3-axis Z-level finish, pairing with Level Rough. A blade is an island the contour walks around, never an edge it crosses. Geodesic Finish drives scallop geodesic contours across the flank itself, holding an even cusp where the curvature changes.

Both let you dial how far the tool may tilt off the rotary axis to reach a leaning or shadowed flank, and every tilted pose is collision-certified. They treat contact angle differently. Contour takes a window — a burnish guard at the low end, where surface speed dies toward the tip, and a gouge guard at the high end — and re-poses out-of-window contacts about a fixed ball centre, so the cut itself never moves. Geodesic takes a single preferred angle and holds it as a preference, with penetration the hard constraint.

What they share is the honesty. Both run the same exact collision oracle, and what the tool genuinely cannot reach is trimmed and reported — never silently kept.

Simultaneous. Collision-certified. No silent gouges.

Verified before you cut

The workflow

1. Importa STEP solid — or a mesh, for manual ops
2. Orientplace it on the machine
3. Setupstock and work offset
4. Machiningrecognize, confirm, simulate
5. Poststandard G-code for your machine

Formats, machines & requirements