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4D Morph Detailing is part of 4-Axis Surface Machining. Sign in with your ENCY account to access lessons, assignments and progress tracking.

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So in this last video we're going to be looking at the finishing process that we want to deal with. So obviously up until this point we've roughed out our parts and we've brought most of the surfaces into a pretty nice finish but I'd really like to focus on the tips of these helical veins here. So we're going to use another 4D operation for this and we are going to focus specifically on the Morph 4D operation which is a very very flexible and very very useful operation for this sort of thing. and gives us very very fine control over the direction and conformity of the toolpath relative to the surface.

So the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to select the correct tool. So let's go back into the tool table and we're going to grab the 2mm spherical mill and we're going to select that tool for the operation. The next thing that we're going to do is under job assignment we need to define machining surfaces and a first and second curve for this. So I'm going to grab the curves first, I tend to find it easier to work that way.

So that's going to be my first curve because as you can see it's at the root of this plane that then forms the tip here and instead of flipping the camera around or turning the A axis. or anything I'm just going to follow this curve down until we can see the opposing curve on the other side of the same vein there and I'm going to click on the second curve. Now we can do the same again with the surfaces for the sake of making our life easier I'm going to turn off select curves for this so we're just able to grab surfaces. and I'm going to zoom in I'm going to grab one hold down shift and then grab the second and finally the third one and those are our machining surfaces.

Now the last thing that I want to do before I click on generate toolpath is I want to have a look at the strategy and by default the morph strategy will go along the lines which is obviously perfectly valid, perfectly normal. In this case though due to the fact that we're defining a very very small tip and ideally I'd like to get it as conformant as possible I'm actually going to go across the lines which may seem a little counterintuitive to some. but it gives us the greatest control over the profiled shape of the tip as opposed to the smoothness of the length of it. Now of course there's nothing to say that you can't go for a final cleanup pass as well but in this instance I don't think we really need to.

So I'm going to click on across and we are now going to generate the toolpath. And as we can see here we now have a very very nice very neat and very very tightly organized toolpath going across the curvature here and giving us a nice and consistent surface finish hopefully. So if we go back out to zoom extents, reorient the camera, zoom back in a little bit and under simulation we're going to clear that up. and we are going to simulate up to current operation just to save ourselves a bit of time which is fine and we're going to click on run.

Now this is going to run a little bit slowly initially because we're only really interested in seeing how it looks towards the end and as you can see it's only taking off a very small amount. It really is just the tiniest finishing pass just to make sure this form is accurate. Generally though I'm quite happy with how that's looking so I'm going to speed this up and take a look at what it produces towards the end there and there appear to be no nasty surprises there which is always a positive. And yeah we've got one pass of this vein absolutely sorted now.

So as with the previous operation we are now going to go back and we're going to set the transformation. and we're going to multiply this toolpath again around the a-axis 90 steps over four multiplications and we're going to regenerate that. and we can now see that it is covering each of those veins. And with that we've pretty much completed our part using exclusively 4D operations on a non-prismatic part.

So hopefully that should give some fairly good indication as to how to deal with more abstract curved surfaces using a 4-axis machine. Obviously the whole point is to be able to mix and match all of these techniques together to give you absolute control and to be able to grab pretty much any part that you want and be able to say yeah sure I can do that that's not a problem. I hope this project has been useful to you and I will catch you in the next one. Take care.