Vectric Customer

I finally managed to spend some time cutting the nuts. I cut the first set and it was obvious something was not fitting correctly. Well, turns out my threaded rod section was cut mirrored with the threads reversed compared to the CAD drawing. I had modified the post P to correct a lettering test whi...

Next I'll take a crack at the nut. My plan is to machine it from 3 pieces and bond it together.

317 minutes later...tadaaah! That was for the threaded section with the taper bit. Bottom hex area was programmed with a .5" ball end with 7% stepover.

One the tailstock end there is an outer ring which just slides off. It's just used for locating. I have a plywood disc on the indexer end as well with a 1.5" sq block glued to it. I beveled the corners of on the table saw and used a power planer for my " roughing pass". I'm running a tapered ball .1...

Here is a section of the thread and the model

I drew a 4" diameter threaded section in Rhino and am cutting it on my 4th axis. It's going to be a coffee table leg threaded into a big nut which is mounted to a burl slab. I had machined some grooves in the aluminum mounting plates of my indexer so they would locate into the clamping rails. I cut ...

Hey Mark,

You can draw geometry around the eagle head ( like a circle ) and just re-machine that area.
That way you could machine just the head area with the 1/16" bit and perhaps save a bit of time/cutter wear.
"Rest" machining might be better yet but I don't have experience with that yet.

OK thanks again, I'll try that tomorrow.

OK I got rid of the "-" in the Post Processor and that certainly did the trick, thank you very much Gary! I do have one more question which is how to reference the indexer starting position. "W" is my rotary axis. Does it always start the cut at W0 ? Say for example I wanted to avoid a knot or defec...

That is to fix the upside down letters I take it?

Well I managed to finally use my indexer for a test cut. I was initially told I didn't need a wrapping post processor but of course that wasn't the case. So once installed in my PostP folder I was ready to test. I set the indexer on a table beside the CNC bed for the initial movements. I had the pos...

Here is a pic of the loft, you can see the points where I recorded the co-ordinates.

I used a small point carving bit in my router spindle as a crude digitiser. I moved the bit along sections of the slab to extract point locations so that these could be used to draw the surface in a CAD program. After I lofted a 3-D surface of it I imported it into Aspire and simply used the "Projec...

I surfaced the propeller blank to 1mm thicker than the model and centered it for machining. I still ended up being off a very minute bit on my set-up. Also on both projects there was a bit of offset along the length after the models were flipped. I will have to run a test job to test if its consiste...

I added the tabs in modeling. I thought there was a feature for that in the tutorials but perhaps it was in Cut 3D. Also note the cutting resolution of the propeller! I did have the resolution set to the highest but perhaps I have to modify the source model.