I think I'm going to give this a go and see what happens! Great idea, I'll try to post some pics Thanks guys for all your great ideas

Your not being mean because this isn't anything that I haven't told the owner. These are stock parts that if I can make 50 we might sell 1-10 a year. The shop that has historically made these for us wants us to purchase a minimum of 100 at a time plus tooling and engineering fees. That would take us literally years to sell. She apparently has some other quotes out there but she wants to see if we can make these here. I told here we could but they would be ugly which is exactly what they look like. We have a very small metal shop that consists of a manual lathe and mill and a 15 year old Okuma 4020 that we use to make things for whatever the shop needs. This machine is not a production machine. She doesn't care if we make a part a week as long as we have parts for potential orders. And right now we don't have any orders. I am planning on using a 5/8" 5fl ball endmill for the concave side but I haven't got that far yet, the concave side will be mechanically ground after machining so finish there isn't nearly as critical as the aesthetic of the outside.

I'm looking for some guidance on trying to get the best finish I can on some 304 ss parts. Machine cycle time at this point does not matter, I just need to produce one part with the best finish I can then go from there. I work at a quartz shop and I haven't had to cut stainless in a very long time. Cutting quartz we don't use the dynamic tool path whatsoever. So I'm not well versed on all of the options that dynamic toolpath entail. But I have been doing a lot of reading and research and think I have a grasp on most of it. I have to make 50 of these parts that look like the holy grail from indiana jones on an older Okuma mill. They should be turned on a lathe but we don't have a metal CNC lathe. I have some destiny bullnosed 0.03" .5" diameter altin 4fl 1.5" loc end mills and I'm getting a real horrible finish. I'm starting with 2.52" round stock and the finish outer diameter is 2.5". Right now I just ran the outside convex and have not yet attempted the inside concave portion yet. I'm running 2d dynamic contour .02" stepover 500 sfm 0.001" fpt .433 doc with air blast leaving 0.01" for finishing then coming back and taking the whole cylinder portion in one pass. Looks like crap. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated Thanks Frenchy

Has anyone had problems with 2D chamfering routines? When you change a tip diameter in both X7 and X8 it does not dirty the operation, but it also doesn't change the code that goes with it. We just scrapped 2 parts where my programmer forgot to change the tip diameter from 0.100" to 0.270" so the 1st part had a huge chamfer then broke the tool. We scrapped the 2nd part because the programmer changed the tip diameter to 0.270" but didn't regen the operation because it wasn't dirty and basically scrapped the 2nd part with the exact same code that scarpped the 1st one. Oh and broke both tools. Now, if you change the OD of the chamfer tool it will dirty the operation, but the meat and potatoes of using a chamfer tool is the tip diameter and the angle of the tool. I don't know how many versions this goes back but I know it doesn't do this in X3, as far as X4-X6 I never used those versions but I have verified this in X7 and X8. I wrote and email to my reseller and got an email back that he would submit it to CNC. And he also tested it in beta X9 and it's still the same, so hopefully this can be fixed before X9's release.