Freesteel Blog » Suggested Caption: This new machining technique gives you the ability to utilize the entire flute length of the cutting tool, saving both time and money

Suggested Caption: This new machining technique gives you the ability to utilize the entire flute length of the cutting tool, saving both time and money

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 10:58 am Written by:

The Society of Manufacturing Engineers (“Members consider the consequences of their work and societal issues pertinent to it”) ran the Westec 2009 trade show in Los Angeles, which finished on 2 April 2009.

Blogger Derek Goodwin visited the Mastercam booth there and reported:

I ran into Mike Macarthur, national sales manager for Robb Jack corporation and he showed me some incredible video on his iphone of 1/2″ diameter endmills cutting 1″ deep at 75 inches per minute in 6Al4V titanium, using Dynamic milling, he has promised to forward some links and a presentation, so look for this in a future article.

Now things are gearing up for the sister-show, Eastec 2009, in Springfield MA on 19 May 2009, and Mastercan’s has made its press kit available.

x4_dynamic_mill20hi20res

Their new “Dynamic milling” technique looks a lot like our old Adaptive Clearing strategy, which we invented in 2004.

Obviously, it can’t be the same code, or we would have seen some sort of a contract relating to it, got paid a tiny stipend for fixing on-going bugs, and so on. Still, those people at Mastercam have managed to produce a finished product without all the usual embarrassing intervening stages of half-baked flawed and buggy versions that you tend to get in this line of work. They must be much cleverer at programming than we are not to experience all the same set-backs and mistakes. I’d like to hear from them — the people who coded it; not the be-suited managers.

We, at Freesteel, are in eager to share the extremely limited CAM programming expertise there appears to be in the world, and we intend to lend support to any other programming team who is attempting to unnecessarily replicate our work, rather than follow the cheaper and more reliable option of buying the code from us. Programmers must have maximum freedom to pursue whatever apparently irrational course of development they feel is right because — who knows — they might actually be better than us at writing algorithms such as this. It’ll give us something to compete against. Otherwise we’ll get lazy and work on other things.

That’s why a couple of years ago we gave a DLL copy of the Adaptive Clearing algorithm to Delcam so they could bind it into their into the internal development versions of their products and better experiment against it while they were writing their own version.

Since they do not appear to have done this, it can only mean that Delcam don’t feel that this clearing algorithm adds any value to their products. Which is fine. It’s probably the attitude of most of the major CAM companies, most of whom won’t even go that far. Their recommendations of the worth of any strategy doesn’t only depend on whether or not they’ve got it, does it?

Without an organization of any kind representing the interests of users of CAM software, it’s impossible for the ordinary joe to see through the totally self-serving information that comes out of all corners of the business.

Still. It’s not as bad as the financial “industry”. It’s only software, not people’s livelihoods.

5 Comments

  • 1. Neel replies at 24th April 2009, 3:20 pm :

    Seems similar to Onecnc
    http://www.onecnc.net/quicktour/quicktour_high_speed_machining.htm

  • 2. Julian replies at 28th April 2009, 10:45 am :

    Indeed it is. It’s very similar, isn’t it?

  • 3. Freesteel&hellip replies at 19th August 2009, 7:41 am :

    […] 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 […]

  • 4. Freesteel&hellip replies at 7th December 2009, 9:22 pm :

    […] milling, the Adaptive Clearing algorithm (seen in the form of the Mastercam’s herbaceous Dynamic Milling strategy), and the beginnings of multi-core processing. I can no longer think that I am […]

  • 5. Greg replies at 27th August 2010, 11:58 am :

    How about taking on a 4th axis adaptive clearing strategy. I have not seen any type of this being done. You can increment the A axis and do a parrallel cut along the X axis for a finish routine. But, I want to see a HSM stragety that revolves the model on tha A axis and moves the cutter along the X and Z axis for a HSM 4th axis stragety while maintaning a constant cutter load. This should keep your eye on the ball for a while.

Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <strong>