Megabar Plug is cut
 

This winter I started a new plane called the Megabar...
The Isobar is ~80 inches long and the Megabar is 90.
The wings will be the same, along with the weight (I hope),
more room inside, very accurate plug for the molds and better fuel tanks.

The pics below are what I did today at the machine shop.
Darren (owner) and I cut the pug for the front hatch from
6 layers of MDF wood. We used 1 inch ball end mill, CNC
mill, 70,000 lines of code (G01s) to get the most accurate
plug possible.

Over the last month, I learned a program call Solidworks
that I used to design the plane. (pic below) From this
drawing Darren ran another program called Surfcam witch
produced the 70,000 lines of machine code.

It took around 4 hours, at 90 inches/min at 7100 rpm with
the 1" ball end mill to cut the front hatches.....

Eddie Weeks
http://www.corpcomp.com/weeks1/

Megabar Plug is cut
 

all the parts that need to be cut

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Its now cutting the finish cut on the right front hatch

Megabar Plug is cut
 

This is what the mill started with...

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Here is the hatch finished....

Solidworks
 

That is cool I have a interactive disk about Solidworks I may buy it soon.

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Halfway into the roughing


More pics at

http://www.corpcomp.com/weeks1/

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Eddie,
Wow, You've come a long way from whittling Isobars out of boat dock pontoons! Keep us posted.

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Hi Eddie, it looks great, but what is worse learning solid works or the dust from the MDF? I will be upgrading to the latest version of solid works but the program still has a lot of dead ends!What type of file are you exporting to your cam program ? Who sells surcam,looks like I may look into it?
Brg,
Don

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Hi Eddie, it looks great, but what is worse learning solid works or the dust from the MDF?

One just takes time and the other takes a large shop vac....
I was really worried about the dust at first but for the
4 hours of cutting I sat there holding the shop
vac right by the cutting head. Next to no dust left the
machine.


What type of file are you exporting to your cam program ? Who sells surcam,looks like I may look into it?

Surfcam reads Autocad, DFX, Solidworks, Parasolid
and a lot more..

http://www.surfware.com/index.htm


Once in Surfcam, you simply pic the tool, depth of cut,
and a bunch of other stuff, and It will tell you how long
it will take, show you the tool path, and write the
machine code... btw.. Surfcam is only $25,000

Eddie Weeks

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Solid works at 6,000.00 seems like a bargin compared to that! Ouch!

Wow...
 

If you look in the dictionary under "jealous", you'll see my picture.

"Sanding is my life".

Megabar Plug is cut
 

If you look for a new COA software, dont look at entry level one i.e : SolidWork, SolidEdge, Inventor. Since about a years the big CAO system Are about the same price(about 1 to 1.5k$ more) and they have alot more to offer. We use CATIA V5R9 with CamPost post-processor and we are very happy with it. I'm about to mill parts for mw54 turbine ( diffusor). My only concerne by now is that i will use 4 axis for the first time ;)

Machining
 

I've been using Inventor and Solidworks for some time now. Surfcam is great too. This is what I been drawing for the past couple of weeks. Will you cut me one of these too.

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Here is another one.

Name ?
 

Great job Eddie - but are you sure about the name ??

I mean - the project looks really cool, and I am envious of the neat tools you have... and all that kinda good stuff ... but the name sounds like some kind of health-food snack that you'd buy at GNC ;) You're not sponsored by them, are you ? :eek:

Gordon

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Nice work! I did that too a 2 years ago from KJ66 plan on Inventor. I'm a CAO teacher and we used Inventor. Now we're on CATIA V5. I'm doing the MW54 by now (i deleted all my Inventor stuff ). I think that Your compressor look better than mine ;) I did one but it is simplier. Now i'm at work so i will post some pics of my work tonight.

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Cool, I dabble with it on occasion. I have a full helicopter drawn in inventor to scale about 1000 parts. The compressor is pretty close to scale. That was the most challenging with that type of sweep. My intention were to do what Eddie is doing, cnc cut some plugs for production. I have a bunch of scale models of jets that would make some great aircraft. Just finding a cnc machine to do it is the problem $$$. I'm working on building my own large scale CNC router.


Barclay

Megabar Plug is cut
 

Yeah the most difficult part to do is the compressor. I did mine in the surface module ( you dont have that in Inventor) My compressor have the real outline but i did the 'impeller' right from my mind ;) ( i dont have one, so i looked at pictures)

Machining
 

I've been using Inventor and Solidworks for some time now. Surfcam is great too. This is what I been drawing for the past couple of weeks. Will you cut me one of these too.

CADCAM
 

Hi All,
If you are lucky enough to have these mega packages available it sure makes life easy. We use Mastercam for solids but I can highly recommend a cheap alternative for 2.5d milling (.dxf) and 3d milling using stereolithograpy files (.stl) from solids. Its only $200 and beats the pants of many more expensive options for ease of use. Check this guy at http://www.deskam.com Also some resources for making your own CNC router. Use it free for 30 days!
Cheers
Andre

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Here's my pics

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Another one of the diffusor

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Lets see if my thumbnails will work this time

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Hi Eddie, looks great.

What finish is the best for an MDF plug? What will give a hard stable surface but thin enough that the accuracy of the CNC cutting will be retained?

Will you just put resin or will you glass it? How thick of glass could you go for before you screw up the outside mold lines?

Scott Black
Montreal