Spun profile for turning

[fonsecr]

In the latest HSMWorks 2014 development release we have added an early preview of the upcoming "Spun Profile" feature.

At the moment the turning strategies will automatically slice the selected part to get the 2D profile to be machined along the ZX plane. However, this only works if you can find an ZX plane where the slice includes the entire "spun" part. If the part is a mill/turn part you might be required to make the profile manually in a sketch.

However, with the new Spun Profile feature you will be able to automate this task. Note that the feature is currently not integrated directly in the turning strategies but must be run separately. Furthermore, arcs support is being added at the moment so far now you will only get lines in the spun profile.

[fonsecr]

You could have a part like this.

[fonsecr]

The Spun Profile is exposed in beta mode under the Utility menu from the operation manager. This will be changed once the feature is finalized.

[fonsecr]

Once you run the Spun Profile command you will see this dialog. Allowing you to enter an appropriate tolerance, rotary axis, and the part to be "spun". Keep the tolerance realistic!

Ignore the "Use smoothing" setting in the picture for now 🙂

[fonsecr]

After you click ok the profile will be generated (which can take a while depending on the tolerance and complexity of the part).

The profile will be automatically stored in the SolidWorks feature tree. That is Sketch5 in this case. The Plane1 is plane in which the profile is defined.

You can then use the profile as the model for each strategy. Or you can make a revolved feature from the sketch (this is the recommended). Note that SolidWorks might not like a sketch with many lines in it.

[fonsecr]

If all goes well you should get toolpath like this.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

Epic!
This is gonna make turn/milling so much easier/faster!
Good, that's not necessary for turning in general, but possible for hard parts. 8)
We'll have some fun with it tomorrow.

[fonsecr]

And finally the obligatory reminder 🙂

Please use the "Send feedback" feature when you find issues with wrong profiles. Thanks.

[Anonymous]

I've noticed that the Spun Profile is created on a new plane. I ve checked several part orientations and seems this plane does not necessarly macht X axis reference defined on the Job. Was expecting it to be placed on the XZ "plane" defined by the Job orientation.

Any space for improovement here?

[fonsecr]

The spun profile command does not know about a particular job so it cannot choose the same X-axis.

The first step is to make the spun profile and then the job so the X-axis will be in the same direction.

Once the spun profile feature is ready it will be integrated into the turning strategies so you dont need the extra step.

[Anonymous]

Humm,I can accept that, mainly if you're handling imported parts.
When you got a SolidWorks model, it would make some sense at least to try to match this profile to other planes used to sketch revolve features. But that leads to correct modeling techniques..ok. I can live with that.

[fonsecr]

We have now moved the Spun Profile feature to the Utility menu in the CommandManager.

And multi-body components/bodies can now be selected.

[fonsecr]

In HSMWorks 2014 R2 we have added support for arcs. By default some arcs will be extracted directly from the selected model when possible.

However, you can also now enable "Use smoothing" to fit arcs to the generated profile.

E.g. for a part like this you will get the shown profile with smoothing enabled.

[fonsecr]

Arc support has been further improved in the latest development release. Generation performance should also be generally faster. It depends on the part though.

[fonsecr]

We fixes a few issues in the latest development release.

[fonsecr]

The spun  profile feature got updated in the latest development release. This time we tried to improve the quality of the profile. Something that you will generally see for ID. Noise within the user specified tolerance should be reduced now. But let us know if there are any issues.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

The sketch which it now generates is perfect René, even without smoothing it is allmost always smooth with arcs.
Only problem we have is that a lot of are parts differ form each other only by size, so would like to use the same program, with spun profile now we have a problem since it doesn't adjust to changes in the model. Would it be possible to integrate this in the future?

[fonsecr]

Yes, we are thinking about integrating the spun profile in the job and/or operations to make it fully associative. This wont make it into the next release, though.

[Laurens-3DTechDraw]

Would be awesome René!

[fonsecr]

The current utility feature wont be removed. So you can keep using this if desired.