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Gene,
You were evidently a rocket
scientist in your early days
making a million dollars a week give
or take a thousand.
Why in the world did you take such a
pay cut to become
a programmer?
My other thought would be that you
have way to much time
on your hands.
Can you post the outcome of your
helix so we can all take a look?
Good job Gene
Jeff Pieper
Pieper CNC Programming &
Design
EATON
Hydraulics
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 8:59
PM
Subject: Re: [mfg-smartcam] Helix
Frank Ricci wrote:
> Nice
Job!
> How did you do it?
>
Frank
Thanks!
First, create your profile. Any closed profile
will do.
Locate a central point to create your helix. Use Create,
Curves, Helix to
create a helix that has an axis length of -.250" (or
however much you wish
to feed down each revolution). Make your downfeed
evenly divisible into the
total depth you will be cutting. Make the start
and end radius the same, and
large enough to cover your entire profile. The
Start Angle and End Angle
should pass through the start and end point of
the closed profile.
Make a second helix with the same center and start
and end angles Make the
start and end radii about .250".
Group the
helixes and Edit, Explode them into polylines using a tolerance
of
.0001".
Use Geometry, Wall Offset to create offset profiles for
roughing and
finishing. You must use cutter center profiles with no tool
offset. Left and
Right offsets will not work.
Clear the group and
group one of the closed profiles.
Use Edit, Mesh Edit, Project to
project the grouped profile onto the mesh
which consists of the two helical
polylines.
The resulting projection will look funny. The start of the
projected profile
will be deep and abruptly rise to the shallow depth. Then
it will follow the
helix down and around. You'll have to fix this. SmartCam
gets it wrong.
Use Geo Edit, Modify to modify the first element of the
projected profile.
Change the Z value of the first point to the intended Z
start level (same as
the start level of the helix). Delete the second
point, which was a
duplicate of the first.
Now clear the group and
group the projected profile. Use Macro, Execute and
select the
C:\SM11\SHARED\SYSMCL\grthin.mcl. Enter .0002 as the value for
VMT. This
will eliminate some of the points within the polylines of
the
profile.
Now use Edit, Transform, Move to copy the profile down
your chosen increment
enough times to take it to the final depth. Add 1
copy if you want a
clean-up pass. Group just the last pass and use Edit,
Property Change,
Toolpath to set the Z level of the last pass to the final
depth.
If you have done everything right, the entire toolpath, top to
bottom, plus
the clean-up pass, will be a single profile.
Repeat the
process for each of the offset profiles you created for roughing
and
finishing.
It's a lengthy process which uses a few tricks, but when you
have a job to
do that just can't be done any other way, .....
I do a
lot of programming for clients who have their own programmers, but
come up
with these devilish situations that can't be done by normal means.
Let
me know how you make out.
Gene
Bowen
SMARTCO
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