Finished up the first of the Range Rover vent covers I've been working on today.
This piece was a two-side operation, the first consisting of machining the front vent slots, rounded edges, and drilling location holes to locate the part when flipped over. To find the position in the machine, I had to make a fixture plate that would allow me to use pins and bolts to hold the part on the bed securely. Since the piece was quite large, I used the same size stock when making the part of building the fixture plate. The programming for it only took a few minutes and consisted of facing it to ensure the face was perfectly flat, then drilling holes for threading and location pins.
Initially, I used a 2D adaptive clearing method to machine out the pockets in part on the second op, but the machine time was over twenty minutes to do it all. After discussing it with my boss, I came up with a new strategy to remove all the material in just a few minutes; the 2D pocket clearing allowed me to ramp down to the bottom of the cavity, then slot out the aluminum. I'm always a little nervous about using slotting techniques to remove the material as I've had bad experiences with it in the past on hobby machines.
I did notice that I made a few mistakes when tracing the part and forgot to account for an edge that went out farther than my selection, I was able to fix this by manually drawing in the geometry to go farther than it had before. I also forgot to add another contour toolpath to finish off part of the rounded part in the front of the peice.
Overall I'm very pleased with how it all turned out and am super happy to be able to show what I'm working on without having to conceal certain aspects of it!