Pictures of things made in Home Shop CNC

[TomS]

Thanks guys. The piece serves has no functional purpose other than a learning exercise.

Tom S.

 

[cs900]

yeah, not bad at all for a first attempt. Only thing i would suggest is reduce your step-over for your finishing pass. I've found that around .008 step over with anything over .125 ball end mill produces a surface that's easy to sand out the remaining machining marks. Very useful if you want a polished end product.

ninja edit:
Are you using a z-level finishing technique and dropping it .005 per layer?

 

[TomS]

yeah, not bad at all for a first attempt. Only thing i would suggest is reduce your step-over for your finishing pass. I've found that around .008 step over with anything over .125 ball end mill produces a surface that's easy to sand out the remaining machining marks. Very useful if you want a polished end product.

ninja edit:
Are you using a z-level finishing technique and dropping it .005 per layer?

I'm still playing with the CAM side to better understand the interaction among all the 3D machining strategies and their individual settings. Too many choices! For this exercise I used adaptive clearing for the three machining passes. Adaptive clearing is probably not the best choice for finishing but it seemed to work the best for rounding over the edges. Still have a lot to learn.

There are minimum and maximum stepdown and stepover settings but I'm not sure how the program interprets the inputs when machining. If I select a fine stepdown and stepover my computer takes forever to generate the tool path even though the machine time is less than an hour. For this test my finish pass settings are:

Max roughing stepdown = .010
Fine stepdown = .006
Minimum stepdown = .005

Max shallow stepover = .010
Min shallow stepover = .005

Tom S.

 

[cs900]

Yeah, finish passes are a lot of points so they take a while to generate. you gotta pay to play as the saying goes. Adaptive clearing isn't a great option for finishing, but it got the job done.

I'll open up fusion tonight and see what finishing options there are, if you'd like some input.

 

[Metal]

there's a checkbox for shallow areas or shallow something or other that will generate additional passes for curved areas, so you can leave a larger stepdown and it will add detail passes only where needed.

 

[TomS]

Yeah, finish passes are a lot of points so they take a while to generate. you gotta pay to play as the saying goes. Adaptive clearing isn't a great option for finishing, but it got the job done.

I'll open up fusion tonight and see what finishing options there are, if you'd like some input.

Input is encouraged. Fusion has been a steep learning curve so any outside help is appreciated.

Tom S.

 

[TomS]

there's a checkbox for shallow areas or shallow something or other that will generate additional passes for curved areas, so you can leave a larger stepdown and it will add detail passes only where needed.

Thanks. I have Machine Shallow Areas checked as well as Machine Cavities. As I said above I'm still learning the interaction amongst all of the selections.

Tom S.

 

[cs900]

I'll have to double check fusion, but a lot of CAM (and CAD) programs if you hover your mouse over a button you're not sure what it does and hit "F1" it'll take you to the help explanation of what it does.

I'll try looking at fusion tonight, but I think there are better finishing toolpaths than the adaptive clearing. I think that's more for large material removal.

 

[cs900]

kinda quite in here. Working on a (working) replica movie prop. some of you here might know where it's from...

 

[Bill Gruby]

Don't know where it's from but, what does the Model Engine "Glow Plug" do ????

"Billy G"