This is in succession to my earlier post i am wanting to learn the lathe w/live tooling the only thing i will be producing for awhile is these flanges pictured below, not to difficult, the thing is i will be doing the programming by hand, i am a newer programmer that has mostly been brought up on cad/cam systems. Does anyone know a good place for me to start. I need to learn at least enough to make these bad boys for awhile. All help apprichiated!!!
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thanks
PS I WILL BE USING AN OLD VERTICAL LIKE THIS
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Live tooling huh? That should be a blast! The square part with the radiused corners may get you scratching your head, but the diamond shaped one will be so similar to it that I think I'd do one or the other, then progress to the other. The round parts with the holes won't be too bad.
You say your doing these programs by hand. Do you have access to a CAD program. I've done all my programming by hand for years, and the CAD allows you to cheat on the trig equations, speeds things up a bunch finding tool paths and such if you apply a little imagination to what your asking the program to do.
i've run a big ol nasty Bullard, but it was pure manual. I concocted an idea about fitting it with ballscrews and servos and a control. We were cutting rubber molds on it, and CNC would have made those radius corners with tangent angles sooo much easier.
Unfortunately, I have zero experience with live tooling programming. Would love to get into it, but never have I been in a place to learn it. There has to be facilities to tie the chuck to the live tooling as in an A axis, or a C axis, on a mill. If you've done 4 axis work in a mill, it may be similar to using the rotation of the chuck to cut in Y, like a mill.
