Centroid Community CNC Support Forum

Good afternoon everyone.
I tried to post this yesterday, but as I was about to hit the button the server was down all into the night time.
So here we go. I made a trunnion plate system for my 4th axis last year.
I have 2 plates. 1 plate has all of the dowel pin locations and bolt threads for machining cylinder head intake and exhaust faces.(not shown).
2nd plate has dowel pin holes and bolt holes with the chambers opened up to machine fire ring grooves and any chamber work. Now what shops are doing is machining a taper on the quench area. This has a diameter of 4.00 inches with a 5-7 degree taper inwards to center. This helps control the flame burn on nitrous added engines.
I did look around inside Intercon and can not really see a way to do it. I see the circle pocket but no way to taper out the Z on the cuts.
My friend is writing me a program I am assuming with mastercam. Which is fine but I would really like to be able to use intercon.
My reasoning is that with the intercon I can copy and paste different engine bores and angles with a rename and just edit any dimensions as needed on the fly. Say I get a head in that is close to the intake valve seat, I could change the angles,diameters ,stepovers ..etc.

I am not sure what I am looking for, helical interpolation ? I am trying to avoid cad/cam programs but if needed that where I will go.
I am open to all suggestions so fire away how this can be done.
Old time machinist here that only has intercon as cnc training. I have never used cad/cam before as I am sure that is another learning curve.

Thanks in advance.
Jeff
S-K Speed

IMHO this is a job for CAD/CAM, not for Intercon.

My workflow would be to probe a point cloud from the default chamber
Hand grind one and probe for the final point cloud, or model it in CAD
Then generate a tool path in CAM and machine it.

Rhino for point cloud to STEP and modelling

Fusion 360 for toolpath, or with more invest Mastercam

Uwe

Thank you Uwe.
I had a feeling you were going to say that.

My friend did write me a program in Mastercam. He was not feeling well today so he never came to my shop so we could run it.
The only problem with the "1 trick pony" program is I can not change anything on the fly if needed.

Is Fusion 360 and Mastercam the only 2 programs that will write the proper tool path? I guess I am looking for something simple to learn.
What if you were going to cut say a radius bowl shape. Like on a Mopar hemi cylinder head. How would you program a large radius cut like that?

Thanks for taking a look.

Jeff

Even a Hemi chamber is not a simple dome, because of the valve seats and spark plug.

Your example here is a kind of organic 3D shape.

Intercon is made for 2.5D milling, not for complex 3D.

There are more CAM systems that can do the job.

Mastercam is the market leader in function and pricetag.

Fusion 360 is ok and not very expensive, but no functions to import point clouds from probing, that is what Rhino can do for 1000 bucks.

With these tools you can build a streamlined workflow to do changes to your design in a few minutes.

If you want to do jobs like these you have to go through a learning curve, but after it you can mill what you want on your own

Uwe

Uwe
Just to be clear, I am not looking to profile that chamber shape.
All I am looking to do is the circular cut that you see which is 4.00 inch in diameter that ramps towards the center at a 5* angle.
I did not think this was such a big deal to find a simple program that would do the math and generate the tool path.

If it is only a circular milling with shallow 5°, I would use an endmill with a 5° grind on the face...

Uwe

Every professional cam can do a 3D job with just “1 click”. I first create a 3D rough job (HSR) and then a 3D finish job (HSS). I use Solidcam, but have also worked with Mastershit (Mastercam, which is years behind other CAD/CAM systems). A combination of CAD with integrated CAM is best. For me Solidworks with Solidcam plugin.