CNC 4th Axis at work

[John S]

Here's one I did earlier :dance:



Ignore the dancing about, the X3 was on a transport stand ready to go to the 2006 Harrorgate show and the castors were not locked down.

This is another gear but instead of being done on a rotary table or 4th axis this one is just done in X, Y and Z fixed in a chuck bolted to the table.



The model came out of a CAD parts file off the web as an STL file, programmed in Vectric's Cut3D and cut with a 2mm ball nose cutter.
The video shows the final clean up pass in the opposite direction to remove some of the cutter marks.

It could have been a lot better if I had reduced to stepover but as I'd not done one before I didn't want to waste a lot of cutting time if it didn't work.

Never got round to doing a finer pass gear and some bastard nicked that one anyway [ probably Kip :whistling: ]

Spiral helicals are one of the hardest type of gear to cut and a one off can take well over a day to cut in a home shop.

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