I wanted to use D2nc to cut the gear on the crankshaft. The problem was that D2nc had no way of generating gear cutting gcode, so that was the first task. To add gear cutting gcode ability to D2nc, which I did in the recently released version 2.10.7. I tested it by generating the code to make this cut. Worked perfectly.
To extend the life of the gear cutter, I used the constant volume modified algorithm in D2nc which reduces the cut load on the first pass and uses constant volume material removal for subsequent passes. The other options are constant volume and fixed depth per pass.
Below you see the completed gear cut. I decided to take advantage of the setup used to cut the gear and also cut the square drive which connects to a broached 1/2in square hole in the crank cheek. Here again I used D2nc’s “CL + 4th Idx” path feature to index a simple linear cut 4 times at 90 deg intervals.
