advanced 3d carving on 4th axis rotary

[magicniner]

Nick I don't want to high-jack Reefy's thread but looks like we are both thinking along the same lines here, what would you say would be the best format to use to produce either a hand or in my case a car if not an stl.

Phill

Phill,
You could process an stl to reduce the polygon count, meshes lend themselves well to complex shapes but if you have fine detail in a mesh model you have a huge number of small flat surface elements which will break CNC tool paths into hundreds of thousands of short straight moves.
Ideally you should work in the native format of the CAD system you use, then your CAM can use curves, I use Bob-CAD/CAM V25 so anything I want to share is usually exported as both .step and .iges and the recipient uses which suits them best, I only use the stl format for exporting parts for 3D printing.
Regards,
Nick

[reefy86]

figured it out and now have the results i was after and feel comfortable with the software now so that's great but the problem i am having now is the total hours to complete 31 hours, the size is only 180mm in length and 51mm in height. It may have something to do with what you say about stl file but my model was done in 3ds max with turbosmooth so it has alot of polys

[magicniner]

figured it out and now have the results i was after and feel comfortable with the software now so that's great but the problem i am having now is the total hours to complete 31 hours, the size is only 180mm in length and 51mm in height. It may have something to do with what you say about stl file but my model was done in 3ds max with turbosmooth so it has alot of polys

What roughing cutter & path and finishing cutter & path are you using?

[reefy86]

here is both rough and finish settings

[magicniner]

Why are you roughing with a ball nosed cutter?

[reefy86]

no idea i am just following a tutorial that has similar details

[magicniner]

Unless your stock is very close to your part size the limited DOC and greater cost of ball end cutters means it makes no sense to use them as roughing tools, was the tutorial authored by an industry professional?

[reefy86]

This was the tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8aWk6oTiF0&t=707s

[magicniner]

This was the tutorial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8aWk6oTiF0&t=707s

You could do the job quicker by roughing out to within 3mm of the finished surface with a more efficient cutter, then semi-finishing and finishing, provided roughing doesn't chip the material.

Did you notice that his spindle speed is 10000 rpm?

[reefy86]

for now i have no idea what spindle speed my machine will be able to do once finished but changing spindlespeed in deskproto doesnt affect the machining time, as for the cutter i have no idea what tool is best used accept the ballnose that only gets shown in tutorials.