Contemporary approach to the design of circular form tools for complex-geometry part manufacture

Abstract

Form tools have been used in industry for a number of decades. Their use is booming and such growing popularity can be attributed to minimized manufacturing costs and shorter manufacturing time. On the other side, one of the major drawbacks is the method of their design. It reflects in the constraints present in the machining of straight-line and circular arc segments of a workpiece. For each segment the rake angle has a different value, which imposes an additional constraint. In case it is necessary to use form tools to manufacture complex-geometry parts, the value of the rake angle would require to be zero. The paper presents contemporary design method of circular form tools by implementing CAD system. This way, it is not only provided a constant value of the rake angle across the entire cutting edge, which can be different from zero too, but also optimum tool geometry for machining a desired material. Additionally, the geometry of a form tool designed using a new method was experimentally tested.

Keywords

• circular form tools
• lathe machining
• methodology
• cad/cam systems
• computer graphis