I cut my head badly on my BT48 today...

[Brady Watson]

Here's the first part of it...and I need to say that what I am showing you is NOT available as a complete assembly from ShopBot. Do NOT call them and ask! They will tell you NAY-NAY! You can buy a BT48. You can buy an indexer. If you combine the 2, your on your own. I can't blame them since it must be a nightmare keeping up with every different configuration & type of user out there.

Ok...that said, I've been putting off doing this conversion if for no other reason than I have been inundated with work...a good thing these days I hear. (Geez...I sound like Yoda...)


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To answer your 1st question, I didn't run it 'PowerStick style' for a number of reasons. 1st, I like the machine's footprint the way it is & adding a powerstick would eat into the floorspace. This is a 1st Gen BT tool, so the drive system on the machine is a little different than the drive systems now shipping, and a bit more difficult to employ. Since most of the time the tool will raster along the indexer's centerline axis, I found parallel to the gantry beam to have the best stability...and last but not least, I can get about 39-40" between centers, which is plenty unless I decide to get into turning long columns, which in that case, I'll just build a dedicated machine.

A while back I made a 3D model of myself (look on the Vectric page...I'm the guy with his arms folded being cut out...seriously!) I took the head off of the body and added some hair in ClayTools. The head is pretty basic and adding hair was a snap:


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I then pulled it into ArtCAM and unwrapped it.


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I couldn't see any real distortion, so I went ahead and toolpathed it.


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...and ran it on the BT, first by doing a 3D rough finishing pass in multiple steps


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...and then ran a finishing pass with a 1/8" ball. It was quick & dirty as you can tell by the stepover marks.


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As you can see, the head looks a bit distorted...so there must be something that I missed. This is the 1st full 3D rotary thing that I have cut out since my PRT days...so I am re-learning everything. One of those things just like anything else...use it or lose it!


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If I have time this weekend, I am going to cut the same model using a 4-sided strategy, using PartWorks3D. This would eliminate any skewing of the model caused by areas that the bit cannot get to - look at the nose - it is wider than it should be & width of head is narrower than it should be. Everything in Pro looked good (see toolpath lines), but it cut out skewed. This leads me to believe that my unit values could have gotten messed up as I was tweaking VR etc or something else at the machine is not correct. A full investigation will ensue...

More on all of this later...

-B

[rb99]

Very nice work. Well done.

RB

[gpari]

Not what I was expecting
I'm the guy that likes to look at traffic accidents...

The head looks like the news guy when my kids have been playing with the widescreen remote.

I need to hook up my spindle, I can't stand seeing y'all have fun without me.

Gabe

[khalid]

Brady..Nice work and you are beautiful..Looking as Knight

Just look at your Neck it is thin....I think you have stopped the machine before completing the work... In other word, the machining will be done till your head fall of the stock...and it is true....because you didn't do one thing...
I will explain the things to you a little later because i am going outside to purchase some stuff for my CNC Quilting machine...

I know what u did wrong

Regards

[myxpykalix]

It almost has a "caricature" look to it. You might have something there!

[curtiss]

Are you sure some of the features were not pasted in from Socrates or Plato ??

[Gary Campbell]

Brady...
Nice adaptation! I love this stuff! Did you disable the X or swap it to the B?
Gary

[Brady Watson]

Thanks guys. It's still a work in progress. File creation is no problem, just something awry in the execution. I'll nail it down. Yanno...there's no learning unless you screw up...and there's no learning without chaos of some sort...There are many ways to use the indexer. Using via B axis config with degree raster incrementation is just one. I will explore the other methods and post results when I get to them.

Yeah Jack, it does look that way! Resembles Shaggy from Scoob's crew.

Gary - I never liked the BT factory config with the X as the logical Y and vise versa. I swapped the X & Y as soon as I got it, so as you view the front of the machine (like the pic at the top) the Y is front to back & X is left to right. With a PowerStick it makes sense. Keeping the table in it's original 'short config', it made most sense to swap the axes.

As far as the indexer goes, it is running as a B axis. No Unit Value 'magic number' like back during the PRT days. The BT moves in X,Y,Z,B. It is running in degrees. All of the indexer hardware was adapted to run on a PRS Standard configuration. The headstock is an 18:1 PK series motor and I have another G203 in the control box. I pulled the Alpha 10:1 off of the factory mount and put the PK motor in it's place. There's no doubt that the Alpha 10:1 is superior to the PK...I just didn't want to hack the PRS control box apart to adapt the Alpha driver. The Gecko fits right in
The Alpha setup has a keyed 12mm shaft, a special chuck adapter and a OneWay Talon chuck. Rather than machine the adapter or wait for a new one to be machined and shipped from Canada, I opted to take a ride over to Penn State Industries. (took me 2.5yrs to finally get over to the place) I bought a Barracuda chuck on sale for $199, which came with all kinds of goodies (and it's Titanium coated for a little *bling*). I also got an adapter for the chuck that I could adapt to the PK motor. They also had a few different steb drive centers and steb live center for cheap...The Robert Sorby stuff is good quality, but I didn't see the need to spend $70 for what PSI had for $16.

More later...I'd like to explore PWorks3D and 4-sided milling using it...

-B

[khalid]

29 Lines, 5 Paragraphs, 422 words, 2190 characters...
Hope you will do it...

[rb99]

Are there no dust collectors for indexers?

RB