Hi Jack, I have done this. A couple of years back I built a 2' x 4' router for a local wood worker. It also had an A axis that he used for turning barley twist legs and such like. It took a bit of settings up but it worked reasonably well. I created a SheetCam post to do the appropriate axis swapping.
I don't currently have an A axis for my mill and I can't really justify the time and money to build one just for this job. The idea of using a lathe with a few code tweaks is much more appealing :-) I did try playing around with turning the spindle into an A axis but I had lots of trouble with tuning. The combination of inverter drive and a fair amount of backlash in the gearbox made things rather difficult. I might have another go and see if I can get some semblance of stability at speed. The spindle encoder gives 4000 counts/rev so if I can get the PID loop stable it should have enough resolution for this job. Les Jack wrote: > I went to a ShopBot event last year and saw where folks did 'turning' using > their indexer. > > The process they used was to determine the 'final diameter' and layed out a > rectangle > of 'unwraped' surface (length as the length of the turning, width of the > 'final diameter'). > Then put whatever they wanted on the 'triangle' using various methods. Once > done, > the pathed it, and used the just routed the piece as a plane, using the > indexer as the > 'x' axis, and the 'y' axis as the indexer. > > You might be able to take that thought and make your 'unwraped surface' to > be the > profiles of the 'unwrapped' cams. > > Let us know how you attack this (if you do). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
