CNC Lathe

[jon_brady]

Can you use cut3D to cut out figures on a CNC lathe

Hi I haven't used cut3D yet and have been going over the literature about it and Haven't seen anything about 3D work/positioning for a lathe. I have a Legacy Artisan CNC machine that does both flat stock and has functionality for turning/lathe work.

[rscrawford]

You could probably use it for 4 sided cutting, and the lathe would just turn 90 degrees between cuts (you'd need to edit the g-code to turn the lathe 90 degrees between sides).

But you can't do true 4th axis cutting with Cut3D. Even with Aspire you can only do wrapped cutting (outputs either the X or Y axis as rotation on the A axis). True 3D 4th axis milling requires rather expensive software.

[mrmfwilson]

I have a legacy Arty. What I've found is that you can trick the Cut 3D software by specify the bottom as the reference. Then use half of the material size to generate the tool paths. Make 4 files and then combine them and add in the rotations. You might have to play around with over cutting beyond the boundary to get really good results. Lots of work and easy to screw it up. Really would be nice if they could add a feature to specify the center as the Z0 point rather than just top and bottom. I have run across some free software that will allow you to take an stl and create code to use the center as the Z0 point. I created a detailed post either on this forum or on the legacy forum. I'll attach the text file of the post.

[rscrawford]

Why not use the top surface as the zero reference? That should remain the same each time you rotate 90 degrees if you have a square blank.

[mrmfwilson]

You are correct Russell, but you still have to make 4 separate files at half the material width because we want to rotate it about the center. Cut 3D assumes you are cutting the part from top to bottom. Setting it on a table and rotating it. The Arty is set up with offset 6, Z0 set to the center of the horizontal axis. It comes with some custom software to use the horizontal axis and profile bits with. So for us it would be cool to use the center as the Z0 axis. And it would be cool in general if that could be a feature of Cut 3D. It would be close to real 3D carving with 3 axis and could be used on a CNC 3 axis lathe.