Today I worked on a Land Rover Dust Cover Plate for one of the local high-end auto shops. I can show this part because it's a stock feature on some of the older Land Rover models that were discontinued and difficult to find.
For this part, I had to set up two vices in the Haas VF2 and 12" soft jaws in both to hold the 24" aluminum bar. The first op consisted of tracing the part out, cutting all the vent grooves, then finishing the curved faces with a ball endmill. Then I'll make a fixture plate with one the spare bars of aluminum using location pins and bolts to hold it in place and finish the rest of the features from the other side and cut it out.
The vent cutouts were relatively easy to cut out, I used a slightly smaller endmill than the size of the cutouts ramping down past the bottom, then used a contour toolpath to come in and clean up the walls removing the few thou I left behind. I started from the center and moved my way out so each cut would have the most rigidity and leave a more excellent finish.
For the contour of the whole part, I only went down a few thou past the bottom of the curved features; this allows me to have enough stock around the base to get removed in the second op. I then went to a 1/8" square end mill and roughed out the curved sections of the part, leaving eight thou for the ball endmill to clean up. In the final finishing toolpath, I used a 1/8" ball with a four thou stepover, which left an excellent surface finish. Unfortunately, I had some difficulties trying to get the scallop toolpath to work due to some of the features on the part itself.
For some reason, the manufacturing addition was available to me for a week or two a while back but now is restricted again, my boss didn't upgrade so I'm not sure why I was able to use some of the features before. I did end up using a few of the credits that you start with to get it for the day and used the trim feature to avoid certain areas in the model.
I also had to clean the surface of the part after the rest of the operations were finished due to a mistake on my part. Unfortuantely this pushed burrs down inside each of the grooves of the vent slots and so will probably come in again and re-contour the inside faces to remove those instead of trying to do it by hand.