Finishing a Mold Cavity

[eliot15]

Hello,

Below is a mold cavity showing:

- the walls already finished by an Advanced 3D Contour operation,

- the floor partially finished by an Advanced 3D Flats Cut operation.



Both operations use a 0.25 ball nose end mill.

We ran this program on an aluminum mold yesterday. The walls finished beautifully. But the floor is a little rough. Acceptable, but a little rough. You can see the stepover lines cut by the ball, like:



We are unsure how to approach a better finish on the floor. Two schools of thought have emerged.

1. Decrease the stepover on the ball significantly, and just let the program run for another hour. The guys in this camp feel that the only way to get a good blend between the walls and the floor is to use the same ball cutter.

2. Use a flat bottom end mill to cut the floor, then blend the wall/floor intersections. The guys in this camp think this is an obvious solution, but aren't quite sure how to pull it off in GibbsCAM.

Any thoughts? Feel strongly about one option or the other? Have a third to suggest??

Thanks

[double a-ron]

Why don't you extract the floor geometry, then do a simple roughing op for just the floor. Then do the walls with a ball end mill. You don't even need solid surfacer to do it. Either attach the .vnc or send it to my email (pm me yours first) and I'll show you what I mean.

[FloridaClay]

What happened to the pictures? It's tough to help without seeing the pictures...

[eliot15]

Sorry. My bad. I accidentally deleted them out of my Image Shack storage. Got this issue pretty well worked out though. Thanks.