I need to make a set of four of these hinge links for my heat treatment furnace -
and decided that rather than manually machining them it would be an ideal job with which to learn a little more of my way around V25 BobCad/Cam (Build 996).
I only made the model with one complete end as I'd be flipping the parts to machine the second side.
The model was constructed from a 90mm x 19mm x 3mm "Cube" with 19mm cylinders subtracted from the ends then a 19mm x 3mm cylinder added at one end and a 19mm x 6.2mm cylinder at the other end to give the projecting feature.
I'd started out by simply adding two cylinders to a cube and then in desperation when nothing seemed to be working resorted to first removing cylindrical sections from the "Cube" (in case there was some unseen complexity with hidden leftovers from the cube messing up the path generation) then adding the cylinders back in.
Pocketing the hole was a breeze, so was profiling the outside of the circular projection, then the wheels came off my cart!
Try as I might I couldn't get any of the available features to to generate a tool path to machine all of the large flat area without either missing some in the centre or ploughing through the projection, all with or without adding boundaries where possible.
Some features created paths inside the circle when the flat surface was selected to machine and the circle was selected as a boundary, where options were available it was possible to get them to flip to the outside but that just replicated the Profile feature and didn't address the flat surface.
I worked my way through all the 3-Axis features that offered a possibility of doing the job and was almost ready to give up and spit the dummy when I tried "Equidistant Offset". It works -
With the same model geometry Equidistant Offset works where all the other features fail, it doesn't need a boundary setting as it recognises the shape of the flat surface and deals with it, I feel sure there should be a feature available to 3-Axis Standard users which is capable of the job, but I can't fid it.
Does anyone have an idea how this could be done by someone with 3-Axis Standard? It's only by chance that I ended up buying 3-Axis Pro and I feel sure this kind of job must be possible with the basic software and that I must have missed something somewhere,
Regards,
Nick
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