Freesteel Blog » Machining steel experiments

Machining steel experiments

Saturday, January 9th, 2016 at 12:15 pm Written by:

Here’s what it was all about. After facing off at 0.1mm stepdowns, I hard-coded a helix at 0.05mm stepdowns per revolution to a depth of 6mm, and then made a semi-circular spiral out at 0.05mm steps till it went off the edge.

Nothing broke, even at this implausibly low spindle speed, and so on. Even so, I was cowering most of the time till I got brave enough to put my head up above the table.
steeldone
Anyways, this concludes this little experiment. To complete the job in question, which is some kind of a one-piece profile blade, I’ll need a tapered cutter and the ability to generate the necessary toolpaths, which I can easily see ought to be something similar to Adaptive Clearing.

Unfortunately, Adaptive Clearing is owned by capitalists whose job is make sure all the money and resources from the customers goes to them and away from anyone who could possibly develop a new and more productive version that — for example — was intended to become a standard component of every machine tool controller. I can see that in the future this algorithm ought to be embedded and be able to respond to direct laser scans of the stock on the table as well as force feedback information from the cutting tool. This isn’t in the business plan, so there is zero chance it will ever get done. It’s a wonder that anything ever progresses, when the economic structure demands the real money is made after the fact and then divvied up according to who has the most power among those in receipt of the customer’s payments, while anyone with the vision to create something new has to live off dogfood for the duration.

The folks at AD are almost certainly quite proud that there is nothing I can do to influence the 100% capital flows into their bank accounts from the consumers of this software. No matter what kind of amazing toolpaths algorithms I could design at this point it’s never going to pay enough to get even one assistant to help me out in getting it to work in a reasonable time. I’m completely on my own. What a waste of time and talent, might I add. I’m sure someone will get it done in the industry in about 50 years time. Anyway, best to get back to work. Whatever that is.

1 Comment

  • 1. Matt replies at 19th March 2016, 3:45 pm :

    I have been using HSMWorks for some time and love it. I have built an entire business around 3D adaptive clearing. I have 2 CNC mills and 1 CNC lathe. If you’re ever in San Diego my machines are at your disposal. I use to write finite element software and shape optimization software when I was a graduate student, so I have a lot of appreciation for work. Thanks for making these amazing algorithms!

    Cheers,
    Matt

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