You Know You Want a Revolution

[Mooselake]

It never ends, I've been here for 43 years and found that if you think you're done you've missed that you need to start over again.

I'm not sure what to call it other than 4th axis CNC.    Lathe doesn't really fit (I have too many, both wood and metal, lathes), while a lathe can't turn a square (you can come somewhat close with eccentric chucks or creative mounting) this can't hollow out a bowl.  I think of it as more complementary.  I work mostly with home-harvested wood (have around 70A of woods) that only looks round, so I've been using a wood lathe to prepare stock for the Revo, way faster than 3mm deep cuts with a 1/4" bit even at 100ipm.  Making it straight afterwards is pretty easy, I've been hand typing gcode, but I'm the kind of guy that thinks typing G1 X300 A40000 F2000 is pretty cool (or distance/stepover times 360).  The A axis is effectively infinite, although that can bite you when you do a G1 A0 instead of resetting zero. 

My original motivation for the Revo, and for woodturning, was ornamental turning and rose engines.  Regrettably I still haven't gotten there, but I'm closer.  I found rose engine simulation software on github, it was written for a homebuilt lathe/cnc lashup and will need modification but it's a good starting point.  The biggest problem I see is that even CNC ornamental turners use a thing called a cutting frame instead of a spindle.  It's a belt driven disk with cutting tools stuck in the sides so instead of a single point spindle it cuts a disk shaped path.  Definitely possible to simulate, but are my memories of engineering math classes a long time ago (I went to engineering school with a slide rule) good enough to figure it out?  Until then I've been dinking around on walking sticks (bad knee...) and for grins made a wooden spoon.  Not particularly efficient to start with 3" round stock and turning almost all of it to chips (vectric seems to only be able to start with round stock on a 4th axis) but it was an interesting project.

The Revo is too big to take on our winter journey south so I'm thinking of building one of these while we're down there.   Long enough to do a walking stick without flipping it end for end.  I already have most of the parts so maybe it'll actually get done.  This site has a lot of information on making them.  Turns out that 2" diameter maple, removed a lot of brush this summer and stacked it to dry, isn't particularly straight or round, so I may need to rethink my planned source of material and have a maple tree or two turned into 2x2s

Kirk