TOOL PATH PLANNING

Today machining relies heavily on CNC machine for conventional job, but very selective machines are made for sculptured wooden surfaces. Though there are some CNC machines specially for machining sculptured work but their cost are way beyond the limit of artists. This book presents a method of tool path planning for machining complex sculptured surfaces by triangular mesh offset for cheap and efficient NC- machine which can be used by artists easily without learning its technical. Once the surface is offset by ball nosed milling cutter radius, the tool path planning is performed by ray intersection method separately for roughing and finishing pass with variable pitch, assuming the milling cutter as a ray which intersect the offset STL surface, to generate the cutter location points, the CL points are arrange systematically to generate tool path for 3 Axis NC-Milling Lathe and 3 Axis NC-Vertical Milling for raster and circular milling. Test pieces are verified by actual machining and graphical representation.