How to cut 5 axis wireframe geometry?

[67 Yankee]

I need to make this curtain track but am having a hard time trying to figure how to make the 5 axis machine do this simple thing. I've made several similar tracks that bend left and right, but never up or down like this one. I have all the tooling from the typical 2-1/2D track setup and would like to use the same basic method. Mill the center slot, open the slot up inside the part with a keyseat type cutter, and run a corner round tool on the outside radii. The problem I have is figuring out how to make the tool centerline stay normal to the floor of the part. I realize that the floor inside the part will be slightly concave, but that will be acceptable for this part. This type of path would also be very helpful from time to time in our shop for chamfering or corner rounding the edges of certain parts, or for using a brush to deburr or finish parts before they come out of the machine.

 

The file has been uploaded to the FTP site as:

/Mastercam_forum/MCX_Files/curtain track.mcx

 

 

Thanks for any help getting this going!

[Guest]

check out CURTAIN TRACK_JMP

 

I created curves along the inner edge, created a spline off of the curves, measured the opening move the spline to the center and used a 5 axis curve toolpath and the surface I created on the inside face as the tool plane surface.

[67 Yankee]

After picking it apart I think I see all of what's going on all except for projection normal to plane. Normal to surface makes sense to me, but either way seems to generate the same path. Having the tool axis control normal to the surfaces seems to make the projection method unimportant at least in this case.

 

Great stuff and gets me headed in the right direction for sure. Thanks a ton John!

 

by the way, check out the yellow entities on level one .

[Guest]

LOL, I didn't even see that.

 

would have saved me creating another one.