'Great minds' and all that.

Yesterday I used the CamBam trochoidal pocket plugin to cut out the teeth for a ratchet made from Jarrah hardwood. Conventional shallow cuts tend to take the corners off the teeth where the grain is tangential to the wheel so being able to do a 12mm depth of cut with a 2mm diameter tool is a bonus. I still had to redraw the original ratchet design (produced in Gearotic which will also draw HTD and many other pulleys for you) with rounded teeth to avoid some chipping. This cut used a two-flute straight cutter with a speed of 1000mm/min and a stepover of 0.15 (0.3mm) and the maximum 24000 rpm. This took about 25 minutes for the 110mm diameter wheel.

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