Revision as of 04:40, 31 December 2008

NEW - HITCH FEED Push Bending

CNC Bender can now hitch feed during push bend to create a helical tube shape with many loops from a material that is much longer than the bender.

NEW - Push Bend Twist GEARING

CNC Bender now gears the rotational twist motion to the feed motion in order to create more accurate helical shapes. As the Feed axis moves forward, the Rotation axis rotates at a pre-programmed gear ratio in the Push Bending Profile page.

The older Twist Velocity column is replaced with the Twist Gear column. The lowest effective gear ratio value is 0.002 units.

This results in a much more accurate synchronization between the Feed and Rotation axes during helical push bending.

The ratio is used as "degrees of twist" in the following formula:

Rotation Degrees of Twist PER Feed Axis 1 Millimeter

So a twist gear of 1 would cause the rotate to twist 1 degree per the feed axis 1 millimeter of motion.

NEW - AutoCalc Push Bend Feature

CNC Bender has a new AutoCalc tab in the Bend options that allows you to automatically calculate the angle for a multiple circle helical coil.

Enter the circles in the helix, and press Calc Angle to find an approximate bend angle for a helical coil several levels high.

NEW - Automatic Bend Combine During XYZ to FRB Conversion

CNC Bender now allows you to automatically combine adjacent bends into a single bend if the adjacent bends meet a preprogrammed criteria controlled by the Low Level dynamic options.

This feature is important because centerline XYZ data always represents bends that approach and exceed 180 degrees as two separate adjacent bends.

This part was drawn in SolidWorks and extracted by Benderlink for SolidWorks into XYZ data.
The data was imported into the XYZ data page of CNC Bender.
When XYZ to FRB conversion is made without the Combine Bends feature enabled, the result is five bends as shown in this FRB page. Bends 1 and 2 match, and bends 3 and 4 match. This is because each set of bends could be combined to represent a single bend.
Enter the Low Level menu. The Combine Bends feature is enabled in the dynamic options. The distance and twist thresholds are set so that the internal formula understands when two bends can be joined into one bend.
When XYZ to FRB conversion is made again, there are now only 3 bends in the FRB data. The first two bends are combined into high-angle bends that are proper for CNC benders.
This is the resulting image in CNC Bender Bender Data menu: