Ron,
Thanks for your reply and link:
http://cncsb.onlinestoragesolution.c...er/indexer.htm
Do you have a secret or two you can share with us? lol. I think where i get hung up is trying to figure the number of spirals.

As in Waynes example he quotes a pitch of 9 inches per rotation. That example seems more relevent to wrapping text or an object around a cylinder.
In using a spiraling bit to create a traditional rope molding you are confined to a rotation or "pitch"(travel in the X axis) of no more than the radius of the bit you are using.

By using a long pitch what you get is illustrated
in this pic which is not what i want.

19808.jpg

Now i'm not a programmer but it seems to me that something could be written that turns the indexer a specified speed while the carriage travels in the X axis but what determines the rotation speed and carriage travel would be the bit size. Am I oversimplifying it?
This would be what i would want to accomplish

19809.jpg

Has anyone been able to create a rope spiral as in this example? If you notice the bit actually creates half the hill, the valley, half the hill of next cut. That is why the pitch has to be so tight, or you end up like the top example. Thanks Ron for your help. (or anyone else?)