  Nowadays, high-speed machining is usually used for production of hardened
material parts with complex shapes such as dies and molds. In such parts, tool
paths generated for bottom machining feature with the conventional parallel
plane strategy induced many feed rate reductions, especially when boundaries of
the feature have a lot of curvatures and are not parallel. Several machining
experiments on hardened material lead to the conclusion that a tool path
implying stable cutting conditions might guarantee a better part surface
integrity. To ensure this stability, the shape machined must be decomposed when
conventional strategies are not suitable. In this paper, an experimental
approach based on high-speed performance simulation is conducted on a master
bottom machining feature in order to highlight the influence of the curvatures
towards a suitable decomposition of machining area. The decomposition is
achieved through the construction of intermediate curves between the closed
boundaries of the feature. These intermediate curves are used as guidance curve
for the tool paths generation with an alternative machining strategy called
"guidance curve strategy". For the construction of intermediate curves, key
parameters reflecting the influence of their proximity with each closed
boundary and the influence of the curvatures of this latter are introduced.
Based on the results, a method for defining guidance curves in four steps is
proposed.
