Quote:
Originally Posted by MrForbes
Mainly, I see the extensive use of CNC material removal as kind of wasteful. This mostly has to do with the fact that I'm cheap and lazy.
If you have the resources to purchase extra material and then cut it away, then go for it!
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You make valid points about pocketing. On 254 we feel that lots of teams just pocket away with no understanding of why they're doing it, other than to look cool. Individual teams have different resources. If a team doesn't have much in the way of CNC resources, they probably shouldn't be designing a diamond patterned belly pan...or pocketed gearbox plates.
But the two points above make zero sense to me.
1) If the part is going on a CNC, the time it takes to pocket is trivial in most scenarios. Our gearbox plates would be run maybe 3-4 minutes quicker if they weren't pocketed. The time to setup the machine is the biggest sink, not the run time. I don't see what laziness even has to do with it. It requires more effort to manually mill any kind of gearbox plate than it does to CNC mill it.
2) Your comment about "buying extra material just to throw it away" doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If my gearbox plate fits inside of a 6" long piece of .25" x 6" 6061 bar stock...how am I throwing material out? I'm certainly not pocketing material that is outside of the bounding box of the part. I'm pocketing material that is inside the perimeter of the part no matter what.
I'm glad that you think pocketing isn't necessary for your team, but 9/10 years 254 would not make weight without the heavy use of strategic pocketing.