A Peek at the Upcoming G-Wizard Cut Knowledge Base

Dec 14, 2010 // by Bob Warfield // Blog, Software, Techniques // No Comments

What’s a Cut Knowledge Base (KB for short) you ask?

It’s a way to dramatically enhance your feeds and speeds based on the real world performance of your machines, tooling, and shop practices. Look at it this way–wherever you’re getting your feeds and speeds inputs, be it a sophisticated calculator like G-Wizard, or directly from your tooling manufacturer’s data sheets, that information is a set of recommendations to use as a starting point. The more variables it considers, the better the starting point you get, which is why many of our G-Wizard customer’s like the product so much. But, it’s possible to do so much more.

So how does it work?

Let’s suppose that every chance you get machining a part, you push the envelope a little bit. Turn up the feed rate override or the spindle override. Make the job go a little faster. Further, let’s say you’re keeping good notes throughout all of this. It won’t take a busy machinist very long to have mapped out a lot of useful information about how far the envelope can be pushed without breaking a cutter, producing a bad surface finish, failing to meet tolerances, or otherwise getting into trouble.

G-Wizard’s Cut KB is designed to make the process of collecting the data easy, and also to make the process of searching through your notes to find the best feeds and speeds for a particular situation fast.

Here is the UI mockup:

Cut Knowledge Base

Adding a new entry to the Cut Knowledge Base…

In practice, it will work like this:

While you’re still gathering new information, go ahead and enter your proposed cut. Bump it up a little bit if you’re feeling lucky (’cause that’s a 44 Magnum, the most powerful, oops, sorry!). Run the cut, and then come back to GW Calculator and press the “Cut KB” button. You will see a screen similar to the mockup shown there. Why are there so many things there?!??

Because each one of those things might be a variable that affects your cutting, especially as you get closer to the edge of the envelope. The exact kind of tool holder, type of coolant, type of cut (e.g. peripheral, pocket, spiral, slot, etc.) all have an impact on what’s going on and should be correlated when building your Cut KB. You may discover you can take the cut further with an ER Collet Chuck than you could with a setscrew type holder (it’s pretty likely, actually). You will discover that peripheral milling a shape with no concave cul de sacs in the outline can be done a lot faster than pocketing.

Going faster when Machining is all about mastering more variables, so its important that as we’re collecting the Cut KB data, we make it as valuable as possible by capturing lots of variables. You don’t have to fill them all out if you don’t want to. The KB will hang on to the values you used the last time for things like Tool Holder or Coolant.

Now, once you have built up some data, perhaps you’ll come to a job where you don’t want to experiment with going faster, you just want to jump in and go as fast as your Cut KB says you can go. Answering this question is basically a database search. You want to find documented cuts in the Cut KB that correspond to what you’re trying to do. You want to see the range that you’ve worked with and maybe have a look at some of your notes. You’ll be able to search using any combination of the variables provided by the Cut KB. You’ll be able to answer questions like, “What are my best feeds and speeds for 6061 with my 1/2″ special unobtanium coated cutters while pocketing.” You’ll get back the list of entries in the KB that match those variables. From that list you’ll be able to zero in on the depths and widths of cut as well as the feeds and speeds. The more data you feed the KB, the smarter it will get.

Over time, G-Wizard itself will get smarter too. It will be able to draw on that KB information to enhance its own calculations so that you don’t have to do so much searching through the KB results. It’ll just pop up better Feeds and Speeds recommendations.

Many CAM programs have the ability to use a KB as well, so GW will include the ability to export your Cut KB to an Excel file, for example, which many programs can then import.

There’s a lot of work to be done yet, but I wanted to get the mock up in front of people so they can think about it and send me feedback. The goal of the screen is to capture the important variables that uniquely identify a cut but that are not already specified in the Feeds and Speeds calculator. These are additional variables, like TEA (Tool Engagement Angle) or toolpath type, that are important to fully characterize a cut. If you want to look at it first hand, just download the latest G-Wizard. The “Cut KB” button is there. Remember, it’s just a mock up, so isn’t operational yet.