Slicing File Format Issues

[Flite-Metal]

Our Boeing B-47 projects have come to that fork in the road to success as do many projects.

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=18614&stc=1&d=1376845451

I have image files for the to be CNC milled components in multiple formats as a result of the output from the Ashlar-Vellum Cobalt software. However, the individual who created these image files created skins and not solid geometry.

We have access to two Alphas in the TechShop facility in Round Rock, TX with the fine assistance of a close friend experienced in the CAD-CAM with these mills.

Because the individual creating the original files created skins so far when we have gone to slice into 1.5" high Z axis depth per mill section the software in use does not see the surfaces. Not a surprise after all the failures we have seen in the past.

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=18613&stc=1&d=1376845470

However... I do have the original .ar Ashlar-Vellum native file formats which I can export in multiple formats which I hope someone here has experience in dealing with to get this done.

The emoticons don't have an image of down on the knees begging for help :)

We have bled all the way past the root of our fingernails folks. I made it clear to the person drawing the images that we needed solid geometry and not just skins...... ah, he knew so much different because a yacht builder in New Port News, Va permitted him to provide them files this way and they milled the foam for him...so I am left with this issue of excellent designs I can not mill...

Looking For Experience Help :)

[Flite-Metal]

Here are the image formats I can export to from the Ashlar-Vellum .ar native software format.

Not being familiar with what can be sliced with the software accompanying the ShopBot mills I have to
depend on your experience to know if one of these can be sliced in 1.5" z thickness to permit us to do
our milling.

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=18615&stc=1&d=1376851399

What will Cut3d import? We think that is where we need to go to slice the files and obtain the proper
cut format for the image I have.

[tomwillis]

Ed - I have Graphite and can open *.vlm & *.vc6 files. Additionally - I have Rhino and RhinoCAM and a demo version of Cut3d. With that being said - I believe you will still need a solid to machine/slice in 1.5" increments. Cut3d will import a variety of files - but I've had the best luck with *.stl files. It may be one of those deals - where someone has to recreate them. I am willing to view and import them and give you some feedback. Are these proprietary?
Tom

[Brady Watson]

Cut3D & PartWorks3D (same thing) will machine STL files, as well as a number of other 3D MESH formats. It will not machine a solid. However, this should not be of concern. Cut3D *should* fill in that skin/shell so that wherever you sliced it will be flat and level, rather than a thin skin. The skin will become the outside geometrical boundary and everything on the inside will be filled, or 'solid' - so you should be good. I just tried this with a hollow sphere that I sliced in PartWorks3D & it worked as I described.

A word to the wise when exporting from your Solid program to any mesh format - if there is a tolerance option upon export, make sure that it is small enough to resolve the shape of your part without introducing large faceted polygon faces. These will telegraph into your finished surface. Make the triangles/quads smaller if you find your model looking a bit faceted when you view it in Cut3D. Good surface quality in your foam starts with good surface quality on your exported model. Play around with different settings. If you make the tolerance too small, then the model can get too large on disk, and you may not have enough RAM to work with it. Experiment with this.

-B

[Flite-Metal]

Ed - I have Graphite and can open *.vlm & *.vc6 files. Additionally - I have Rhino and RhinoCAM and a demo
version of Cut3d. With that being said - I believe you will still need a solid to machine/slice in 1.5" increments. Cut3d will import a variety
of files - but I've had the best luck with *.stl files. It may be one of those deals - where someone has to recreate them. I am willing to
view and import them and give you some feedback. Are these proprietary? Tom

Hello Tom,

Thank you for your feedback and I believe there is a way to overcome my issue.

In the Ashlar-Vellum .ar solid drawing/surfaces editing tools, under surfaces to solids... It would appear the original .ar file can be edited
"into" a soilid following the prescribed convention.

I will quickly explain what happened. A project partner in Va. used Ashlar-Vellum to create the .ar in Zenon. His specific B-47 is to be
smaller than ours. The original .ar file dims are those of the 1:1 Boeing B-47 after he, I and two others combined our data with that
obtained from the Smithsonian and very, very little from Boeing.

Cold war mandated Boeing's archives be purged and all but a few of its engineering contents burnt immediately upon rollout of Boeing
B-52's, the replacement for the B-47.

We homologated eight multiple view drawings to derive a single drawing which matched Boeing engineered dim declarations. We had
two hand drawn (1946) marked up Boeing B-47 drawings to use as tie breakers when contradictions were discovered.

The above process took in excess of two years. Earlier this year, I discovered an aviation rag illustrator's excellent B-47 drawings.
After two months looking for Chris Davey, he surfaced after an inquiry through Osprey Publishing.

Chris offered his original 1/48th original drawings for sale, along with a copy of the Sept. 12-25, 1980 Aviation News, a newsprint
aviation rag published in England. After less than 1/10th of a second... :) I said yes, and three weeks later I received everything.
I had determined Chris' drawings were the most accurate drawings compared to the 1:100th Boeing drawings.

I now had decent comparison points, and perfect documentation to compete in FAI F4C competition. From all these I created
cross sections which led to CAD then audited for accuracy and finalized as Ashlar-Vellum .ar files.

Yes, I own the intelligent property these files were created from. As for use, the person in Va. who drew in AV did so in surfaces
rather than solids as the CNC miller in Newport News he used for milling accepted files as is.

In reading the Solids and Surfaces editing documentation for Graphite and in knowing all the editing tools are identical between
all AV software, I feel you may be able to help us by expanding these back to back symetrical surface files into a solid ar.

To prevent undercuts we are milling at 1.5" slice thickness. A friend sent me sliced sections of the .vlm he had run through Cut3d.
They were clean, but yes they were surfaces with a declared thickness.

The AV Graphite solids tools state there is a filler for a circumstance as this. It is under solid tools, thickening of a surface. There
is a trigger to fill to a solid :)

Tom,

If I send you a test file of our inboard nacelle in its native .ar format, would you see if this surface image can be thickened to a
solid as documentation states? It is symetrical and therefore can be parted down its centerline front to rear, thickened then
mirrored for the second half.

Ed Clayman
Houston, TX.
wmclayman@comcast.net

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=18623&stc=1&d=1376926657

[Flite-Metal]

Ed - I have Graphite and can open *.vlm & *.vc6 files. Additionally - I have Rhino and RhinoCAM and a demo version of Cut3d. With that being said - I believe you will still need a solid to machine/slice in 1.5" increments. Cut3d will import a variety of files - but I've had the best luck with *.stl files. It may be one of those deals - where someone has to recreate them. I am willing to view and import them and give you some feedback. Are these proprietary?
Tom

Tom,

Tried to telephone you at your listed address...but no luck with a foundation answering machine greeting me...left no message. 713-291-1923

http://www.talkshopbot.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=18632&stc=1&d=1376933715

[tomwillis]

Ed - I sent you an e-mail.
Tom

[Flite-Metal]

Ed - I sent you an e-mail.
Tom

wmclayman@comcast.net
Try her again... :)

[tomwillis]

Ed - sent another e-mail. Subject is Boeing B-47 Project....maybe check spam.
Tom

[Flite-Metal]

Thomas and Brady,

Called Sean in Austin and told him regardless of how Cut3d showed image for the file you said it is really going to cut as a solid. He
had appointment this afternoon which might have him returning too late to test today.

I'll report back immediately after he has a chance to mill the nacelle. Would be exellent to hear back that everything was fine... Boy
would it ;^)

[Brady Watson]

Ed,
If your desire is to have 'hollow' models cut on the bot, then the 3D file will need to be offset to the inside of the outer skin in order to achieve this. You should be able to do this easy enough in Cobalt, although there can be more to it than meets the eye - like stitching up the edges where the front meets the back side skin etc. Since you are working with solids, this should be a much easier task than attempting to do this with meshes.

With a properly offset model, Cut3D will respect the void center sections, like the hollow part of the turbine housing etc. Right now, your models are like a veil draped over 3D points. You need to determine the inner geometry of your parts and in conjunction with the outer skin, join them together to create the hollow model.

Your model looks like it is on the right track, however - you have some more work to do, if you want a hollow model off of the CNC. Offset what you have & double check the new dimensions. There is always more than one way to skin a cat...or a plane ;) - for instance, you could section up the parts in CAD, then take a cross section & 2 rails and sweep each section around to create a hollow closed shape. If you know your material thickness, then you can omit slicing altogether in Cut3D, and just prepare models of an appropriate thickness & pull them in one at a time to toolpath. There are other ways as well...

Also, keep in mind that Cut3D is a very basic 3D CAM program that gives you limited control over toolpaths. There are other CAM packages out there that would yield higher quality 3D cuts and more control over the process as a whole.

-B

[Flite-Metal]

Brady,

As stateed, these drawings were done as surfaces, not solids. I need to revert them to solids with AV software using the
solids/surfaces tools to extend the surface to a solid per the AV documentation.

This appears to be a straight forward conversion which is a standard function of AV's drawing and editing baseline product.
AV told me all their products use the same drawing and editing core functionality and tools.

So, I have the original .ar files for my fuselage, inboard, outboard nacelles, and the rear sheath containing the rear turret.

All of these are surfaces. Surfaces do have an X, Y, Z defining their shapes to the "thickness" of the surface. Therefore
the surfaces to solids functions of the software to fill the interor of shape to a solid.

I only have a Cobalt Share program and the demo version of Argon. Both permit opening, viewing, editing...but no saving
to a new file name when edited.

Tom Willis says Cut3d will mill the outside surfaces when sliced and not the interior space if we do nothing at all and simply
mill what we have now.

If that fails, I need someone's assistance to up-convert our surfaces to a solid.

Cut3d will do what we need done. That is the easy part for the future when we have nothing but solid geometry instead
of surfaces we have now. Interior of our shapes will be hot wired to retain greatest strength.

[tomwillis]

Ed - first let me say - I am no expert on Cut3d. Brady is correct - Cut3d is limited in it's tool pathing. Cut3d will still treat your hollow sections as hollow in the exhaust sections - as shown in those pics. It may get you close to where you need to go....but after reviewing this to get a model trust worthy of flying - you most likely will need the interior dimensions...so it's not just a 'skin and remodel it accordingly. One section of this mesh protrudes right beyond the edge into the btm - as if the CAD designer just dropped it in. My guess is - it would need a fillet taper where it meets the other part of the model.
tom

[Flite-Metal]

Somehow in my attempt to keep my Q & A simple without baggage outside the scope of our current milling issue, I have lost creditability in that you guys don't seem to understand this is not our first rodeo... :D

Everything relative to this entire project has already been engineered. All we are in need of is milling some sections to make it less labor intensive to achieve the detail of compound and convex shapes and replicate the effort for multiples of the same items required... There are two 1:8.7669 airframes with one of the two created so it can replicate two different airframes...:eek:

The entire mechanical functionality of this project is based on an inner truss with a pair of internal truss attached internally to permit all stresses and mechanical functions to be strong and endure the stresses of flight.

The Dow High Load 60 Styrofoam shape which "replicates" the Boeing B-47 Stratojet is a facade with virtually no function except to endure abuse of flying and handling. I have been making these using hot wiring of individual sections from nose to tail for twenty plus years. Doing in CNC is faster and less expensive with greater accuracy.

To achieve this I have gathered well over 30 gig of documentation including multiple view artist renderings since there are only two Boeing engineered drawings in existance. When this project began three and one half years ago there were fewer than 10 Google returns from a search. Today there are well over a thousand as a result of the spiders we put into motion doing online research. We have over 100 million online references to our project. Many of the returns found are explicitly ours. This is not unusal as that is how web bots function in search engines and one search engine to another.

We have everything engineered from landing gear to articulated rear cannon to four flying radar seeking drones which are released from one config of this airframe. Another does a lofted release of an atomic bomb with parachute delay of its delivery to target while the airframe escapes the blast wave.

Competing in FAI F4C is a tuff task. Of the USA entries we have seen only a few earn as close to 13th or 15th place since 1981. My desire is to effect change to that.

That's a short hand tour of our two 1:8.7669 Boeing B-47 airframes with three different configurations:

[Flite-Metal]

Here are the three configs of our B-47's.

Because the original files were generated in Ashlar-Vellum as surfaces instead of solids, I am going to see if the surface thickening
to a solid editing function will provide a cure to what has haunted this project since the originals arrive here...two months ago. We
have been met with constant contradition since they arrived. Tom Willis told me about the Surface to Solid editing function so we
are going to the gentleman working with us at Ashlar-Vellum to order the retiree version of the software. We were planning to add
this later as every $ spent outside of planned elements puts us at a disadvantage down stream.

[Flite-Metal]

I appreciate everyone's contributions and feedback. This project is literally weeks from completion given we can mill a few parts to
eliminate having to do it the old fashion way. One would imagine this would have been simpler...it isn't folks, it isn't as this witnesses
as my second session within ShopBot's forum.

Mr. Zellmer at ShopBot is working with me to resolve an easier to digest pathway using Cut3d to negate having to go to the moon
to get across the street.

Thanks for the help guys.

Geez, would certainly be nice if the editor would stay functional instead of shutting down after ten minutes. Makes detailed text and
examples difficult to manage.