Development of a new computer aided manufacturing system for variable pitch screws fabrication

The study focused on the development of the CAM system restricted to the fabrication of variable pitch screws by using turning centers. To develop the dedicated CAM system at a low cost, open source programming language was used as much as possible. A commercially available 3D-CAD system was used to model variable pitch screws. The edge data of the variable pitch screw was extracted from 3D-CAD data of the variable pitch screw, and then a number of the edge data were copied by the amount of feed in the longitudinal direction of the screw to make a cutter path. The successive cutter path was repeatedly generated by reducing the size of the edge data. The advantage of this method of generating the cutter path is very simple and easy to use, compared with the conventional CAM systems. During the cutter path generation, the system can detect the collision between the cutting tool and the workpiece. As a result, the validity of the developed CAM system for variable pitch screws fabrication was confirmed from several examples of the cutter path generation.