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Indeed, there are many projects out there where someone converted a manual rotab to become a 4th axis. There are cases where we do continuous machining with a cnc machine router table 2020 axis—in other words, we want the cutter to be machining as the 4th axis turns. But there are also many other applications. When indexing, no cutting happens until the 4th axis is stopped and often locked with a brake of some kind.

For example, to produce a cam lobe. The most obvious case for indexing is to gain better access to the part. The 4th Axis indexes each tooth into position, stops, and then the cutter makes a pass back and forth until the tooth is done. They the next tooth is indexed into position. But, there are much simpler cases where indexing is also extremely helpful. Suppose you have a part like a throttle body that has holes on all sides. You could build fixtures and do a bunch of setups, one cnc machine router table 2020 each side.

Or, you could also use a 4th axis to index the sides so more Table Top Cnc Router Machine Repair than one can be machined with a single setup. But another reason is that almost any Horizontal Mill has a 4th Axis Tombstone arrangement:. They load and unload the tombstone which is the big upright chunk of cast iron the parts are held to while machining while cnc machine router table 2020 machine is busy cutting new parts on a tombstone in the machine.

As you can see, they have things set up so they can even do more than one kind of part on a tombstone. Well, I wrote a whole article about how to figure it outbut here is the bottom line:. Now tell me, would having room for nearly twice the parts on your table increase productivity? For many jobs it sure would.

This video of a turbine blade being machined makes the difference between continuous machining and indexing pretty obvious:. There are a couple of advantages to Continuous Machining.

First, you can machine shapes that would otherwise be impossible or very difficult. The closest thing possible without continuous machining would be to index as many positions as possible and use 3D contouring toolpaths cnc machine router table 2020 try to get the job done.

This can be surprisingly effective, but is seldom as powerful as true Continuous Machining. The second advantage comes when profiling with a ballnose cutter. The ballnose has a weakness, which is that the closer you get to the tip, the slower the flutes are spinning.

It sounds counter-intuitive, but just think of that tip as a series of concentric circles at different heights. Hence, the tip moves slower. With this technique, you use the 4th axis to allow the ballnose to be presented to the workpiece at an angle, so cnc machine router table 2020 side of the ball is used more than the tip:.

Not only does this allow faster milling higher feedrates are possible but it gives a better surface finish and even improves tool life. Imagine you want to engrave some text on the side of a cylinder. A 4th Axis can be a powerful addition to your CNC arsenal.

It enables all new kinds of machining and can also make existing jobs run faster and require less setup. It should come as no surprise that 4th Axis workholding is pretty similar to workholding on a plain old mill table.

There are many different shapes and sizes of Tombstones available for 4th Axes. The goals with Tombstones are usually to get access to more parts, more sides, and to make swapping many parts into and out of the machine cnc machine router table 2020 fast. Depending on the size of the part, you made need an offset arrangement more like the Stallion version pictured above. The question for this article is how to get a handle on their value?

Put as many parts as possible cnc machine router table 2020 for each setup, in other words. Relying on just a single machining vise, for example, can mean a lot of available table area is wasted versus putting two vises on the table so you get 2 parts per setupor two double station vises so you get 4 parts per setup.

The more the merrier because your setup time divided among all the parts will invariably be less on a per part basis. With that in mind, why not think of that Tombstone in the 4th Axis as being all cnc machine router table 2020 creating more addressable table surface area? Now consider a tombstone like the one pictured above. So, for about every 4 parts we can fit 1 part gets a free ride. In addition, we can machine 3 faces on each part.

Ordinarily, that would take 3 setups which would be a lot more time consuming. Pretty cool, eh? Perhaps by quite a bit. Our total area is now 7. What if we have a triangular tombstone that just fits in the inscribed circle of the table? No problem. The math says each of the 3 faces of the triangular tombstone will be 6.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner! All the same ideas that apply to which chuck to use in a lathe work for 4th Axes on mills. Years ago, I put together a chart that has been useful to me in turning work and we can refer to it here too:.

When turning, for example, you often have cnc machine router table 2020 swap a part end for end, or you may have to take an existing part and put it in the lathe to rework some aspect. With a 4th Axis, you will often just stick in a piece of raw material, in which case Repeatability is not a factor.

Hence the cnc machine router table 2020 of the relatively non-repeatable 3-jaw chuck for 4th Axis work. How much is significant? I was taught 3 or 4 diameters was about a much as you want to hang off the chuck on a lathe before you start looking for cnc machine router table 2020 support. Collets are really nice for turning work hence the ubiquity of the old Hardinge Lathes and their 5C collet system.

They get high marks on just about every aspect. Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of 5C collets is they only allow for parts of relatively limited diameter. This can be overcome by turning things on their head.

Consider this setup:. I never would have guessed it, but Geof on CNCZone says the following 4-axis mill set up was able to machine these aluminum bars to length, ensure the faces were square, and drill and tap a hole faster than he could do it in a lathe. You can imagine each of cnc machine router table 2020 4 parts being a 5C spin indexer and suddenly you fit quite a few more parts on your 4th Axis.

In particular, the access to the part is going to be limited to the access you can get form a vise. Note that on a big Horizontal Mill tombstone, you may mount multiple vises on 4 sides of the tombstone and even more than one on each side.

That creates a lot of capacity! Workholding and Fixturing are always an art that it pays to learn cnc machine router table 2020. The 4th Axis opens whole new avenues for fixturing and setup.

The first 3 Axes are the familiar X, Y, and Z. The A and B axes are potential 4th Axes. Then you can simply refer to is as such in G-Code.

Rotating the 4th axis to the 90 degree position might be done as A90, for example. With most controls, 4th Axis coordinates get all the tricks regular coordinates have available.

So, for example, you can use Absolute or Incremental Coordinates. And, if you there are 4 parts on each side, you might also have 4 sides times 4 parts or 16 work offsets. With those 16 work offsets, you can create 1 part program in your CAM software, set it up as a subprogramthe set the work coordinate, call the part subprogram, set the next work coordinate, call the subprogram, and so on, to make all 16 parts.

Part Zero is, of course, the origin, when programming your part. When 4th Axis programming, it is often convenient to have a part 0 on each indexed cnc machine router table 2020 of a tombstone, for example. That way you can use Work Offsets as described above.

That makes sense for 4 axis CNC indexing. But, when doing continuous 4th axis machining, it might make more sense to have the axis the 4th spins on be 0. Choosing part zero for continuous machining will require that you be very familiar with your CAM software.

Instead, you will use one of 2 kinds of software to help. In essence, you program the work on a flat XYZ plane. For example, you might create some sort of text engraving. The 4 Axis Wrapper Software will then transform that g-code so it is wrapped around a cylinder of a particular diameter.

Wrapper Software can be useful, but clearly it has many limitations. We have a lot of readers who are interested in the details and even in building cnc machine router table 2020 own 4th Cnc Sign Router Machine Table axis. To create a 4th Axis basically requires that the axis be well mounted so it can spin, and that there be some means of controlling that spin via g-code program, preferably Best Cnc Router Machine 2020 Iphone with as little cnc machine router table 2020 as possible—backlash is the enemy of CNC.

The mounting process is not unlike mounting a spindle. Typically there will be a shaft between bearings. I suppose you could even contemplate sleeve bearings as opposed to precision angular contact bearings, although the latter are standard industry practice.

Tapered roller bearings can also work reasonably well for a 4th axis. The drawback is that 4th Axis Continuous machining is impossible because the Geneva Mechanism cnc machine router table 2020 a fixed set of stopping places.

Hence can only be used as a pure indexer and not a true 4th Axis. Hobbyists are often taken with the idea of using a Rotary Table.

Do you know the Vacuum Table in the CNC router machine and the T-slot Aluminum work table.I will introduce them.

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