Today I focused mainly on programming the contract my boss got earlier this week.
I'm not able to show the exact part, so I will do my best to explain the difficulties I've run into and the solutions used. The piece is like a large open frame with a few pin location features on both sides. It's also got some small features on the side faces of the part; this means you will have to rotate or flip the piece each time to access the different angles. There are four sets of four parts each, each very similar in design, so once I get one finished, the rest would take very little time to program.
Right off the bat, it was a bit overwhelming as I had no idea how to start going about programming this part. The main issue I had was clamping it down after the first operation. Since it's got the long pins on the corners of the piece, it would be challenging to hold it down on a table without crushing it properly. I talked to my boss about it, and he explained to me how to do it; basically, you add a large block fixture to the center of the part where the hole would be, and you would use that as the locating and fixturing point. You could then flip the piece over and secure it down on a fixture plate to mill out the other side.
Then the question of how to do you machine out the side features on the part came in to play. Initially, my boss explained to me how to to set them up in hard jaws and use a hard stop and similar work origins for each side; then you would only need to reset the tool height to the top face of the part and keep the x & y point the same. After discussing it some more, he thought of a much easier way to get access to those features using the 4th axis that he has set up on the Haas Minimill. Using the rotary 4th axis you could make small fixture plate and use the holes made from the first operation to locate it, this also means you don't have to reset the tool height for each face, thus saving quite a bit of time.
I just finished up the first operation of the first part and spent the extra time to ensure I can find repeatability with the other parts as far as the CAM setup goes.
I'll show more of the CAM process as I near the finishing stages of it. I continually realize I have to think outside of the box when machining parts and not to fall back on my understanding of it. Even with the piece I am making on the Pocket NC with the speeds and feeds, it's counter-intuitive to what I originally had in mind and yet made sense if you thought it through.