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