In the end I went for a fast rotary axis based on a 3/4" straight-shank ER32 collet chuck from eBay (about £15) with a 6:1 belt drive to a NEMA 23 stepper. This is held between taper-roller bearings in a housing that bolts to the table. The hob is mounted in the milling spindle, and the spindle is set over at the correct angle to suit the lead angle of the hob. In the HAL file there is a direct link from the spindle position to the rotary axis position, with a scaling factor to suit the number of teeth to be cut. This keeps the two axes in permanent synchronisation. The number of teeth comes from a spinbox in a PyVCP panel. (I need to find a way to zero the encoder and steppgen when the number of teeth is changed, otherwise it tries to re-synch when I change the tooth count).
Anyway, on the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, here are approximatelt 2000 pictures. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhICrb0Tbn4 -- atp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
