Freesteel Blog

The Copenhagen Scallop

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 7:40 am Written by: Julian

Another week, another long day in the office in Copenhagen being frog-marched through scallop bugs that I have quietly been ignoring over the past year. Who knows which ones are the most important. No time for blogging or anything like that. I’ll push back any plans for the scallop bisectors, which would be another feature that will merely bring in a whole lot of new bugs once people started using and depending on it. Maybe it’ll have to wait until another CAM system does it, and then there’s a reason to have it.

It’s a bit like the developments in the Adaptive Clearing, now being driven by what others are doing. I had a too-brief look at the Mastercam Dynamic Milling and got pointed out a couple of features that are liked in it which we don’t have. In particular, having different shapes for ramping down into a level, instead of always doing a helix. I think I can frig some algorithm to find an approximate bisector of a pocket for the purpose of zig-zag ramping. Here the average cut depth is half the step-down, but there is a spike in the load at the tool approaches the end of each the zig-zag swipe when the cutter is doing a full width full step-down cut — followed by no load as it goes back in the opposite direction. Maybe the dynamics of this are fine in practice because it has time to cool off. But that would suggest that there is an optimum length for the zig-zag, because if it’s too long then we would have a proportionately long period at the max load. Not that I know anything about real world machining. I’m just guessing.

Tomorrow we catch the ferry back from Esbjerg to Harwich, and then onwards. Hopefully the trains won’t be on strike this time.