The process of CNC milling from a design to a finished workpiece

Source:shengfe Date:2018-06-10 12:55

The process of CNC milling from a design to a finished workpiece
 
The traditional explanation of what happens in the workshop is that an idea is turned into a pencil sketch on the back of an old envelope, and a machinist uses that information to produce a finished workpiece while standing at the mill. That romantic and rather unrealistic view of the process needs some refinement for a CNC machine. Fig. 1-1 shows the stages in the journey from design to completed workpiece, indicating the relative contribution of a human (on the left) and a computer (on the right). The original idea, for example, is an entirely human contribution, whereas creating the program may require both human and computer contributions.
CNC milling
From a software point of view, there are three main stages in the process: create a design, turn the design into data and use the data to control a machine. These correspond to the conventional computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacture (CAM) and computer numerical control (CNC) stages shown in Fig. 1-2.
 
           CNC milling