Wormgear cutting

[GEARBUD]

Can you guys let me in on synchronus machining?
I cut gears as a specialty and it seems to me that I could use my VMC with live 5th axis to generate a worm gear. My machine has a tapping macro,G84.Doesn't that mean that it should be able to synchronize the spindle with the 5th axis?
What would be perfect is tto be able to feed the Z down in a generating mode as the 5th turns in such a way as a fly cutter ground to the rack form for the worm gear would take 1 pass each time around in each sucessive tooth space. Did I say that right? Now as the 5th turns 1 whole turn the spindle would take as many turns as there are teeth on the gear being cut.
One more complication..... the blank would have to turn 1 whole turn and then some to generate the tooth form.
Rental of worm hobs is very expensive....and besides this would be fun to pull off.

[HuFlungDung]

That is a concept that I have wondered about, too. If your machine is capable of rigid tapping, this would mean that it has a spindle encoder which should enable to you grab an index pulse for synchronization.

Whether you have the freedom in your controller to initiate synchronization between the spindle and some other axis movement would be the big hurdle to overcome.

I don't think an existing G84 macro itself would work (because of the retraction), but something akin to the lathe G33 cycle might be closer, where every move is commanded, and the G33 enables the synchronization.

In a Pc based cnc solution, it would likely not be difficult to write the logic for it, but I don't know how easy it is to "break into a black box controller" and mess with unusual electronic gearing between various axis.

[GEARBUD]

Yeah Hu,
I took a look at the macro for ridgid tapping at one time and it looked like a bunch of ???????. If I could break into the macro world maybe that would light thing up.
I think g84 could work to make a worm gear though.
If you ran the Z tangent to the worm blank and set the parameters for travel and pitch you could "TAP" several threads very close together in the Y axis until the pitch diameters lined up and then you would "TAP" all the way around the blank. Then index a smidge and set the helix of g84 higher or lower and do the same. Repeat this a few times and there you go...a hobbed worm gear.
But the other method would run uninterupted and the code would be only a few lines.
I don't know the first thing about these Grizzley rebuilds but I'm piecing the picture together slowly. What a great project they must be.
Thanx JW