How hard is it to CNC this?

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by Greg Needel

this is incorrect....if you have the clearance past the spaceing going past it with a standered cutting mill bit will leave a square notch...the side profile on a round mill while spinning is a rectangle

That's what I was thinking. Perhaps dez was envisioning this thing in a rotary chuck 4th axis which would index that part for each slot and then when it gets to the end of the slot where the big diameter portion of this part is it would be rounded in the end of the slot.

[Greg Needel]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

That's what I was thinking. Perhaps dez was envisioning this thing in a rotary chuck 4th axis which would index that part for each slot and then when it gets to the end of the slot where the big diameter portion of this part is it would be rounded in the end of the slot.

maybe...i am just glad you agree i was going insane trying to figure out what he was talking about....


btw for someone who is good with a cnc mill this souldn't be that bad of a part

[sanddrag]

Would I face it to length, step down the diameter, and bore the (5/8 di) hole on a manual lathe first?

[Rob Colatutto]

Facing the part on a lathe and taking down the outside diameter will make the time on the cnc mill much less than if you just put a square block of aluminum on. However, if you are using a square block you don't need to drill any center hole in the part, the cnc can do that all for you. If you plan on taking the part down on the lathe then I would reccomend having a center hole of some size larger than 1/2 inch so your machinist can easily use a dial indicator and find the center of the part to make set up much simpler. Having the cnc mill do the center hole to exact dia. will be better than doing it on the lathe if you planned on using a drill bit, if you are using a boring bar then you will be fine making it exact, provided your lathe is true. And yes, make sure you take the keyway out of the drawing before you put it into mastercam, it does not like things like that, and it will try to cut it out if you leave it in there.

[edit] to nicely go from Inventor to Mastercam you will need to save it as a .step file, and then you can import that into Mastercam. If you have Mechanical Desktop installed, I would open to .step into there and save it as a .dwg because Mastercam seems to like them slightly more.