While working to build a weight reduced moteus servo mk2, I reworked my outer housing CAM to do all the machining on the Pocket NC v2-50.  For this part I didn’t necessarily need any challenging workholding and since I could get the stock in tube form, there wasn’t an inordinate amount of material to remove either.

The one challenge is that when mounted in the Sherline Chuck, the mill can’t actually reach all the way to the edge of the part without hitting the X travel limit (which is why most of the other 100mm diameter parts I do are fixtured slightly off-center).  In this case I tackled the problem in two iterations.

Iteration 1

For the first iteration, I just used an adaptive clear from 8 different directions to get most of the material out of the way, then used a multi-axis “flow” to finish the outer diameter causing the B axis to rotate while the end-mill remained roughly in place.  Then a subsequent pass came in from the top to clean up all the stuff that was left behind.

This worked, but had a couple of problems.  First, it was slow.  A full cycle time was something like 10 hours, largely because all the adaptive clears spent a lot of time not removing much material and rapiding around.  Second, it left a non-ideal surface finish on the outer diameter.  The “flow” toolpath for some reason seemed to jiggle the mill around in X and Y for no great reason, and occasionally sped the B axis up by like 3 times the normal rate for a quarter revolution for no apparent reason.

Iteration 2

I figured this would be a lot easier if I could just have more control over the mill while spinning the B axis.  I could take all the extra material off the top using the side of the cutter, and produce a nicer surface finish on the outside.  Since that wasn’t possible within Fusion 360, I figured this wouldn’t be a terrible time to try doing some “manual” g-code for the first time.  The “manual” is in quotes only because I ended up writing a python script to do the actual generation.

To begin with, I started with the g-code from a Fusion 360 generated toolpath so that I could get the tool setup, probing and such configured in a way that I knew the Pocket NC would accept.  Then my python script had two options, the first generated the g-code to turn down all the material on the top of the stock to the final length.  It moved the mill into position, spun the B axis by 340 degrees, then gradually moved down a Y step while moving 20 degrees, then spun another 340 again until reaching the end.  This worked out just great, used much more of the cutting length of my Datron 4mm mill, and got done in something like 20 minutes.

The second option in the script was for turning down the OD to the final size.  This used the same basic approach, but instead of setting the Z past the inside of the tube, set it to exactly the OD.  The the Y stepped down in the same manner as before, just over a different range (the top of the finished part to slightly past the bottom).

• the script in question

This got me to where I could start on the internal features in only about 40 minutes of Pocket NC v2-50 time, which is a big improvement over a trip to Artisan’s Asylum and an hour on the lathe in order to get it set up, turning the part, and then cleaning up.