Title: Adapting whirling process for CNC manufacture of bespoke screws with variable pitch and diameters

Authors: Jiaming Feng; Riliang Liu; Yikun Li

Addresses: Key Laboratory of High Efficiency and Clean Mechanical Manufacture of Ministry of Education, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China ' Key Laboratory of High Efficiency and Clean Mechanical Manufacture of Ministry of Education, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China ' Key Laboratory of High Efficiency and Clean Mechanical Manufacture of Ministry of Education, School of Mechanical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China

Abstract: Widely increased use of screws with variable pitch, flight and core in contemporary machinery makes it of great significance to explore an efficient way for manufacturing them. This paper proposes a whirling-based approach to manufacturing bespoke screws of kind. The machining is performed on a 3-axis CNC whirling machine. Unlike conventional whirling process which uses profiled cutters to cut the helical grooves, this approach employs tipped cutters which follow complicated toolpath to cut the screw out of a blank. In order to determine a continuous toolpath to approximate the screws cross-section profiles, one after another, the screw's cross-section profiles are considered as the envelope of the tipped cutters' trajectory and m CC points on each cross-section are relocated at several hypothetical cutting planes evenly. Finally, machining test using an example screw part is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach. [Submitted 29 December 2018; Accepted 27 February 2019]

Keywords: bespoke screw; screw with variable pitch; tapered screw; thread whirling; CNC machining.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMR.2020.110514

International Journal of Manufacturing Research, 2020 Vol.15 No.4, pp.357 - 370

Received: 29 Dec 2018
Accepted: 27 Feb 2019
Published online: 22 Oct 2020 *

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