Holding part on tooling "tabs" - how to?

[marker4x4]

Hi and greetings everyone,


I wonder if someone could share his/her methodology on programing parts that are hanging on tabs after machining. We do quite a bit of those (aerospace) parts and while I could program the entire part quite easily, doing just thosepesky tabs drives me nuts.


I usuallygrab Trajectory and Copy/Paste the same thing over and over with different Start and End points. The trouble is that most of the time I have to eyeball the gaps between the consecutive Starts and Ends in order to provide wide enough tab. Assigning custom Start and End in Trajectory isn't very user-friendly.


There must be a better way t odo this..... I was thinking perhaps running a perimeter curve with "ups and downs" where the tabs should be and use that to drive the cutter tip? But again, creating that would be quite time-consuming too... Just a thought.


I hope this rant makes sense, any advice will be much appreciated.


Cheers

 

[appinmi]

When we use "tabs", the tabs are built into the model which are "cut away" in the next operation. This is fairly easy to do if your model has a family table. One instance for the manufacturing which has the tabs, and another instance which has the tabs removed.

 

[peterbrown77]

We have workpieces in various stages of manufacture, and create them using Inheritance features. AAX or equivalent is required.

Regards

 

[David Butz]

I have used a few methods for this. If you don't want to build the tabs into your model as solid features, you can build in surfaces or datum curves which can serve the purpose. This is often easier to do in the part model itself, rather than in the manufacturing model. Then reference the geometry within Manufacturing.


For example, with a sharp-edged flat-bottom part, you might create a datum cure on the bottom plane of the part, using Use Edge and the perimeter of the part, probably using Chain, then trim the curve back to represent the portion between tabs. Continue until you create as many curves as tabs, using Use Previous for your sketching plane. Now you can just use trajectory milling in Manufacturing and pick these curves for reference.


You might want to represent the tabs visually before creating the curves by creating little surface models of the tabs themselves, or by creating strategic pairs of datum points on the edge of the part; then refer to these when sketching the curves.