horizontal milling spindle

[kurt]

I'm fabricating a brackert for holding a router in the horizotal position in my milling machine and wondering how I might go about creating tool paths for a horizontal spindle in Fusion 360. I could not find anything in an inittial search on the forum. Is anyone doing this? Is the answer really obvious?

[Steinwerks]

This depends on what you mean: is this a horizontal right-angle head attachment, or does it operate as a normal spindle but with the orientation horizontal? If the latter, it's just normal toolpaths and Z is normal to the spindle travel direction. For the first... I'm not sure. You might need a special post-processor.

[kurt]

Sorry if that wasn't clear. It is a right angle attachment so I can do work on the end of long parts.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

That's going to be a special post processor indeed.

[lacrimacz]

Maybe I am missing something, but is it not just a matter of swapping z value with either x or y in post processor? I have actually seen this done by simply swapping the stepper motor cables on a diy mill.

Jirka

[Steinwerks]

If you do everything in G1, sure it's possible. When you want drilling on the end, your G83 canned cycle is going to have a massive CPU fart when it sees the values all screwy. Or it'll break something. G2/G3 are going to require G18/G19 plane changes to work.

In short, special post.

[kurt]

OK, it sounds like special post. What are the options there? Is it worth diving into the process to create one? Will the Fusion 360 dev team help? I'm using a Tormach mill, so perhaps modifications to the Tormach post . . .

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

Since the post processors are open and fully customizable. 

Have a read here: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/post-processors/help-my-post-processor-needs-to-be-edited-now-what/td-...

The post in this thread does a similiar kind of thing: http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/post-processors/help-my-post-processor-needs-to-be-edited-now-what/td-...