programming a dome

[68 SS]

First posting for me. I appreciate any feed back. I am fairly new to Gibbs. I have only done simple hole drilling and pocketing with version 7.3.5. I have attached a .dxf of a dome I need to surface with a ball mill. My question is how? Also I can import a 3d Inventor drawing into Gibbs of this part. Will it be easier to set toolpath to a 3d rather than drawing it in gibbs?

[cadman]

What mill package do you have? (mill only, 2.5 solids, solid surfacer)

Your file looks like a 2D drawing exported as a dxf file. If you have solids all you need to do is extrude the base, create a primitive sphere, slice it at the top of the rectangular base and do a boolean addition. From there you have several ways to surface the dome. If you need help creating the file I can post it for you.


CM

[68 SS]

I have imported my solid into Gibbs and attached it. Yes, I have surface modeling.

[cadman]

Here are a few quick toolpaths for the dome only. For the Contour process go to the transform toolpath plug-in and do a copy and rotate. The downside of this technique is each copy will be a seperate process tile. Read through your Solid Surfacer manual and do the tutorials. They will get you started in fairly short order.

[68 SS]

Wow! It's amazing how something can be staring straight at your face and you never see it until someone points at it. Thank you cadman. I'm sure I'll be asking more questions in the future.