Surface Creation

[E3CADCAM]

I thought I'd start a thread about surface modeling. I am in process of porting cylinder heads, and there's been alot of work required before programming can begin, so...

 

Anyone who has used flowline or flow5ax knows the best toolpaths come from single surfaces. Our programmers used to send parasolid or native cad data (solids) out to a design firm to convert them to a single iges surface for porting. I had the concept down (one of a thousand ways, i'm sure), project enough good splines to loft a new surface. The problem is that the projections never fully align, and we need to have accuracy with the created surface.

 

So, here's my remedy... Ideas for alternate methods?

 

1. Import the solid into MCX2

2. Align with fixture

3. Export solid in position to .X_T or similar

4. Load file in solidworks

5. Create a plane on each end face of the port

6. Create surfaces on each plane to intersect at a vertex and sketch an intersection C/L

7. "Fan" planes between the end planes at 1.0deg or smaller (depending on complexity)

8. Manually go through and create intersection lines of the solid to each plane to create "flow" lines.

9. Clean up geometry, supress original solid and export as .STP (saving 3d curves and sketchs)

10. Import .STP file into mastercam into WCS, further analyze splines, blend, etc.

11. Break all slices (splines) at a common point and create point at break (each).

12. LOFT

 

My results have been very good, not exactly automated by any means, but does the job cleanly.

 

Anybody else have a need to generate data like this, and whats your strategy?

[E3CADCAM]

[silky_johnson]

Seems like alot of un-needed work. I've done some headporting with other software (hypermill), and never had to go through all this work.

 

Headporting is a unique animal to say the least, do you have to deal with the valve guide bump?

[DLG]

Sounds like a lot of work.

 

We do alot of cylinder head porting also. We digitize on the machine, and import the data to MC. We use the 2d surface blending tool alot,

and can get the surfaces how we want them, and then project some new splines , and loft the surface up as 1 surface. Everytime we project the splines, the surfaces get cleaner and cleaner.

I receivied trainng from a expert in cnc porting with mastercam. There are alot of ways to get a result, it's just what works best for you and your application