5 Axis High-Speed Machining of Turbine Vane

[CNC421980]

he is making with solidworks

[MrPizzaman09]

I made some windmill blades on the 3 axis machine at my school.

[zackwootensc]

nice, I use Delcam's Featurecam as well. It is a good program. I design in Autodesk Inventor and Featurecam takes the design and works well to produce g-code. It does come with a large library of post processors. Five axis is definately the way to go nowadays with the complexity of parts that need to be machined on tolerance. Good video, maybe at the end you could show the part completed or in another video. But then again, the people you are making the part for might not like that.

[r32adt3db]

How do you feel about SolidWorks as a design program to design actual parts?

[smolville]

We did it with a three-axis and a very long

1 inch end mill. It didn't work very well.

You couldn't hold tolerance.

[BigKCNCWizard]

The shape is a constantly changing form which would only be able to be machined with a 5 axis toolpath, multiple 3 axis setups or using an extremely large woodruff/lollipop style cutter. I think you may be talking about another job. We machined the job in steel and held all tolerances. And made money on the job.

[cncit]

How long does it take to program a complex part like this using the Delcam.

A lot of cadcam systems i've seen seem very long winded for full 5 axis.

[BigKCNCWizard]

To program this turbine it actually took less than an hour. This includes roughing operations from each side and semi-finishing and finishing operations.

It's easy to get simple and complex programmes out of PowerMILL in a very short space of time.

[cncit]

Sounds good is it easy to mod the post processors for different machines or will the tech guys at Delcam do this for you.

I'm told powermill produces very good clean code for 5 axis work..

[BigKCNCWizard]

The post processor guys at Delcam are excellent. I'm fine tuning a post for a Matsuura MAM72 at the moment and they are always quick to respond to my requirements.

You can make some changes to the posts yourself, but it is all in code so it depends on how quickly you learn it. i tend to make only very small changes myself and leave the complex stuff to the people that know what they're doing.

[cncit]

That sounds a good set up..I have used Featurecam before which is now a Delcam product and that is quite easy to modify the post.

It works great for tombstone machining as it has a dedicated module, just tell it the size of the tombstone and add parts!

[enytned1]

Awesome video. Great work!