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Best way to cut a 50mm hole?

kumaichi

New member
Hi,



I'm new to Pro/E Manufacturing and was wondering what the best way to cut a 50mm hole in the part below. I tried using the Hole menus and it only drilled a whole. I'm trying to use a 13mm end mill so it only made a 13mm whole.



Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks,



Craig



View attachment 95
 
Dear Kumaichi,

There are many ways to cut this hole but it depends on quite a bit. First of all are you using a solid piece of metal or a casting?

If you are using a solid piece of metal, first rough out the material using a pocket routine. Then go in and finish the profile using the same pocket routine except in the parameters, change your scan type to profile only.

If you are using a casting, just use the profile example from above. Hope this helps!



Christopher
 
Thanks Christopher, let me give that a try. I'm actually cutting the peice out of a solid peice of billet aluminum that is 150mm x 150mm x 13mm.



I'm not sure what my sequence should be, like I said, I'm kind of new at this but I though I'd start by cutting the whole out.



Thanks again,



Craig
 
Craig,

First are you trying to do this with one tool or two. If I was doing this hole I would rough drill the hole with a spade drill leaving stock for finishing. Then if the application would allow I would bore to size. If boring is not an option then I would mill to size. This hole could also be milled to size if you were only using one tool but cycle time would be much longer.
 
cncwhiz,



Right now, my tooling is kind of limited so I will probably just be using end mills, I have an assortment up to almost 1 so I can switch tools but it will still be an end mill :-(.



The other thing I have to figure out is how to hold the peice down on the machine while I'm cutting out the shape. I figure I can do this in a couple of steps:



1. Do a volume mill down to the step in between the circular section and the flat peice.

2. Cut the whole out (using the suggestions found here.)

3. Flip the peice over.

4. Volume mill down like in step 1.

5. Here comes the tricky part, how to mill the peice along it's outside edge while trying to hold it down.



I'm new to all of this so I'm sure my steps aren't optimal.



Thanks again for your help with this.



Craig
 
Craig,

Is this a high volume production job? If it is I would use a vacuum chuck. With this setup you won't have to use clamps but this requires machining as well. If it is a short run job I'd say that clamping is the only qay to do this job. If your stock is big enough yo could use tooling tabs. With tooling tabs you could clamp the stock down the drill and counterbore a series of holes to bolt the stock down to a fixture plate. With this method you colud machine the part complete then just saw off the tabs do a little bench work to cleanup the saw marks. As far as what type of milling sequence or application you use will depend on how you fixture the stock. I hope this helps, If you need more help in this project you can email me.
 
Wow, that just goes to show how much I DON'T know about doing this stuff. I looked up what a vacuum chuck is and was blown away, that is way cool. I think I need to do some more research before I actually put this on a mill, I'm still trying to figure out how to do all the steps to make the part. I'm getting better and reading past posts on the site is a major help.



Since this is either going to be a one off or maybe make a handful of them, I'll probably use the suggestion you made about the tabs. I'd like to do some research on that so I can maybe see some pictures of exactly how that works and how I can incorporate that into my part.



Thanks for your generous offer cncwhiz, I'll send you an email when I get closer to actually putting the peice on the mill.



Thanks again for helping out a newbie,



Craig
 

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