Barrel, lens shapes, taper and oval forms are relative market new-comers and are predominantly used in the die mould, aerospace, general machining and power generation industries.
ANCA software product manager Thomson Mathew explains: “The ability to create end-mills with a larger-radius edge permits greater stepover increments. This enables machining with a larger cross over pitch during pre-finishing and finishing operations – improving productivity.” Longer tool life and faster cycle times are the benefits.
He continues: “Replacing conventional ballnose and corner radius applications with the large tangential form radius simulates these applications but the outsized cutting diameter is what saves cycle time and cost; and the resulting surface finish is better as well.
“Bringing these new end-mills, together with the expert advantages of ToolRoom, such as iView and laser compensation, designer edge ballnose, variable helix and tool balancing, sets tool manufacturers up with a complete solution and is unique to ANCA software. In addition, a special fluting operation ensures a constant hook angle all the way along the trajectory of the cutting edge, resulting in vibration-free tools, with less wear and tear during machining.”
Manufacturing complex, sophisticated endmills is made easy with wizard based BSB design in ToolRoom. BSB and DCR tool types are high performance end-mill cutters, mainly used for finishing requiring high accuracies. Also known as circular segment or high feed end-mills., in the current market, cutting tool manufacturers may be looking to enter new markets and this software release makes diversification with high quality specialist tools attainable.
This latest enhancement retains ANCA’s established software user-friendliness and completes the ToolRoom RN34 end-mill package.
Compensation methods are covered as ANCA supports manual, iView and LaserPlus compensation for all geometry, as these tools are highly accurate. Both ball radius and tangential barrel form radius can be maintained within +/-0.002 mm using LaserPlus. This accuracy can also be maintained in batch grinding, with automatic in-process compensation for large volume production on machines with LaserPlus.
The wizard-based design also provides the option to scale tools and adds various other operations, like roughing or chip breakers. Wizard support is available for oval form, taper form and also a custom form for specials. A static view gives parameter inputs for geometry description and there is also a dynamic view available to visualise the geometry as and when parameters are entered.
There are multiple practical advantages of ToolRoom software for cutting tool manufactures
