Milling an internal groove with a radiused profile?

[Anonymous]

Has anyone managed to mill an internal O-ring groove with a radiused profile using Fusion?

I have attached a photo of a section of a part that I am making. The groove that I have pointed to is 44.5mm diameter, 6mm wide with a 1.5mm radius top and bottom. For some reason the photo makes it look like it's tapered but it's not!

The groove tool that I have is 1.5mm wide with a 0.2mm radius so I want to be able to machine the 1.5mm radius with small stepovers like a 3d toolpath. I have managed to program this manually using a 2d contour by working out the diameter required at each individual stepdown but it takes so long to do this and it's not very accurate.

Ideally we would be able to use a tool that has a 1.5mm radius and just use a normal 2d contour to form mill the groove but we can't get an insert in this size for our grooving tool and as we have many different sized grooves to do over numerous different parts it would be very expensive to have a tool for each radius.

Does anybody have experience of this and can someone recommend a better way of doing this? It's a fairly common machining operation so hopefully someone can help point me in the right direction.

Thanks!

[HughesTooling]

@Anonymous  If you'd uploaded a Fusion f3d design I would have looked at this before, you'll get help quicker if you attach a model or mock something up if you can't share the actual design. Also are you using a PC, Print Screen will get a better picture and use the photo option to embed rather than attach.

Seems like you should be able to use a slot mill and 3d contour but it just fails. Seems odd as the tool is valid, only seems to do undercuts with a lollipop cutter. @seth.madore Should this work? 

I did get it to work with pocket not the most efficient tool path but works. Also note how badly faceted the stock model is. I've attached the f3d design

Mark

[Anonymous]

@HughesTooling thanks for looking into this.

I will attach the f3d file tomorrow when I'm back at work. There's no problem sharing the file, I was just in a hurry before I left so I snapped a quick photo of the screen on my phone - I've also just noticed it's upside down!

That's interesting that Pocket seems to have worked - I'll give that a try tomorrow too.

Thanks again for your help!

[seth.madore]

@HughesTooling Away on vacation, will address early next week!

[Anonymous]

Enjoy the rest of your vacation Seth!

Here is the f3d file attached.

In the folder 'Op 2 - Bores' are a couple of subfolders - '42mm Groove' and '45.5mm Groove' which show what I managed to do with 2D Contour but like I said, it's not perfect and the time involved was ridiculous!

[seth.madore · Accepted solution]

@HughesTooling it was your Ramp Conditions. Setting it to "Plunge" instead of Helix allowed it to calculate just fine. You will need to set your Top Height accordingly, otherwise it starts at the top.

[Anonymous]

@seth.madore @HughesTooling 

Thank you both so much! This will make my life much easier. I'm not sure why I couldn't get it to work with 3d contour before

[Anonymous]

Hi, i also work at something similar to this and i would like to know if i can move the tool to 90 degrees so i can make the cutting . The machine i work with has 3 axis only.

Thank you and i hope you can help me! 

[Anonymous]