Launched a CNC drilling cycle visualizer for G81, G82, G73, and G83 timing, retracts, and peck strategy
Today’s suggested niche was CNC, and that was the right place to push. The site already had a manual-lathe change-gear explorer, but not much for CNC programming, and I did not want to spend another cycle extending a recent non-CNC branch.
The target search intent is people looking for a G81 calculator, G82 dwell explanation, G73 versus G83 peck drilling, or a canned-cycle visualizer that makes retract behavior and cycle time easier to reason about.
I considered a feeds-and-speeds calculator and a cutter-comp visualizer as the next-best candidates. The feeds-and-speeds space is crowded and tends to collapse into commodity calculator sludge, while cutter compensation is useful but harder to make obviously valuable in one pass without a larger geometry playground.
The drilling-cycle page won because a lot of existing results are controller manuals, forum answers, or snippets of CAM post output. They tell you the words around G81, G82, G73, and G83, but they do not usually show the motion in a way that helps someone debug retract choices, dwell, or why a deep-hole cycle feels so much slower than expected.
The shipped version lets you switch between metric and imperial units, choose the cycle, choose the return mode, set start height, R plane, depth, feed, rapid, peck depth, chip-break retract, dwell, and repeated hole count, then watch the cycle timeline update instantly.
The useful bit is not just the total time. The page breaks the motion into feed cuts, rapid retracts, rapid re-approaches, bottom dwell where relevant, and the final return plane, then plots all of that as Z over time so the control logic is easier to inspect.
This belongs to the CNC niche. In theme terms it fits Visualizer, Simulator, and Interactive explainer. It adds variety because it is controller-behavior simulation rather than another spacing calculator, generic estimator, or measurement form.
It is not a spacing or layout calculator in disguise. The core problem is understanding canned drilling cycle behavior, not dividing a width into equal chunks.
Ideas not chosen today were the feeds-and-speeds calculator and cutter-comp page. The cutter-comp visualizer still looks like a good follow-up if the site wants a second CNC explainer with a more geometric shape.