Corner Finishing

Nick,

Sorry it took so long to reply. It has ben a tough week. Trying to get some electrodes cut for our EDM department. One of the electrodes is large so I did the whole thing using the roughing and finishing routines in Pro/Man. I also used the corner routine to pick out some corners.

I roughed with a 3/8 diameter flat end mill then reroughed with a .0625 ball end mill finished with a 1mm diameter ball mill then did the corners with a ,015 ball mill.

It worked fairly well other than needing a cray super computer to calculate the tool path. About 850,000 lines of code.

I am running a Dell Precision Work Station T5500 with a Xeon Processor Windows 7 64 bit with 6 Gigabytes of ram and doing the finishing and corner routines brings it to it's knees. I have the cpu gadget running. it shows 84 percent of all the ram being used and only only 1 of the 4 processors running at about 50 to 80 percent use. So i can definately see that Pro is not multi threaded. The problem I have with the corner routine right now is the tighter you set the tolerance the longer it takes to process the file if it doesn't hang up after about a half hour of processing the ncl file. I like to set it to .0001 but I can't get it to process the file. So right now I have it set to .001 and it seems to work.

I have not cut it yet to see what the finish looks like. I am a little worried there will be scallops in the corners with the tolerance that loose.