Created by Mike Tilby on 11/06/2019 15:45:55
This was built to mill very small blades around the steam turbine rotor discs. It was inspired by the brilliant device made by Prof. Chaddock (See: Model Engineer 103(2588): 966 – 969). In my device the long lever ends in a ball-race follower which is moved around a 10x enlarged template of the desired blade form. The follower is 10x the cutter diameter. A Proxxon IBS/E Professional Drill/Grinder is held in a gimbal mount. The cutter tip and follower are 2.5 ins and 25 ins. respectively from the gimbal C/L. Since 0.5mm cutters are rather fragile the follower is moved around the template by an X-Y driven ring. The follower arm is connected to the ring via a spring such that it can be held pressed against the template as the ring is moved in a series of short straight lines that comprise a path around the template. X-Y stepper control is entirely by PIC microcontrollers. A complete path can be taught by manual control of movements and several paths can be saved to a memory chip.
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