I’m planning to machine a few hex bolt heads on my 1100 machine by clamping the part in a chuck bolted to the table. Has anyone ever done this procedure using Path Pilot? Not sure if Path Pilot is capable of doing this.
Trying to find a quick way of machining these hex surface without using 4th axis and without having to do a lot of programming?
There should be a dxf for bolt and screw heads. It would be easy to make the patterns and then you could scale it in path pilot. I think you can even instruct the dxf to make a hex head bolt and a hex driver bolt from the same dxf. I will look at making some generic dxf. Hex Bolt head, round head, Phillips driver, flat driver, hex driver, square drive. I think you can layer and scale and specify the positive and negative space. If I’m right you could make any combination of bolts from 5 files.
Unless someone else has some readymade.
Thanks for this update. Can you recall if you saw this dxf information on this forum?
We will be making quite a few different hex bolt heads and having a quick and easy method in Path Pilot will be a big time savings for us .
If you can make such a dxf file with instructions that would be excellent.
Thanks
I wrote the following subroutine several months ago to machine polygonal posts ( i.e. hexagonal bolt heads).
(Subroutine hex_post.nc 2-14-24)
(#1 X Center location)
(#2 Y Center location)
(#3 Z Top of Post)
(#4 Z Bottom of Hex Post)
(#5 Z Depth Cut per perimeter Pass)
(#6 Flat-to-Flat Distance)
(#7 Diameter of End Mill)
(#8 Number of final cleaning cuts - minimum 1)
(#9 Clearance above post top)