Three Rose ring

  • Finished ring, my first exploration using a two rotary axis milling set up
3 rose ring
 
 

Rhino Model

  • Screen shot of model in Rhino
  • the petals and leaves have some thickness here, but only for appearence. The model used for tool paths skipped the thickness for simplicity
  • the roses and vines are 'floating' above the shank to achieve the desired height as determined with a test mill
  • the roses have been compressed along the finger axis, again per a test mill. In this case the adjustment is not the result of difficulties interpreting the screen to wax translation. More a case of compensating for the geometric contortions imposed upon the model. Below is the fully unrolled model ready for tool path generation.


 
 

Milling Strategy

  • If I were to simply 'unroll' this model none of the undercuts of the flowers or leaves would be cut. Not only does this leave a lot of hand carving the geometry of what is milled is distorted more than is desirable.
  • To properly handle these undercuts requires that the cutting tool always be perpendicular to the surface. Moving the wax simultaniously in 3 linear and 2 rotary axis gets pretty close to achieving this. Another rotary axis isn't that difficult to add BUT the software to generate a 5 axis tool path is slightly expensive.
  • A more affordable, and limited solution for the present is to unroll the model twice. In addition to replacing the circumferential X axis with a rotary C, now the Y linear axis is also replaced with a rotary A. Not ideal, but the improved geometry and partial undercuts make the final form easier to visualize when hand carving.
  • The linear X and Y axis are used only to initialy position the wax blank with respect to the mill's zero ( 0,0,0,0,0) position. Very minor errors here can produce very interesting distortions.




Gallery Next

Copyright © Jeff Demand 2003