Rotary 4th Axis Indexing in Mastercam
tip of the month text
This tutorial is in response to a question on our user forum, to view the topic, click here.
If you are following along with the tutorial file the first thing that you'll notice is that the part is not oriented correctly for our rotary axis indexer.

I recommend that you set your stock for verification purposes before changing the coordinate system (or WCS).
The first thing we need to do is to change our work coordinate system (or WCS), so that the side, labeled side A is facing the right construction plane. We're making the assumption here that the rotary table is mounted on the right side of the machine table which is the normal position.



Our XYZ origin will be at the left side of the part and at the center of rotation in the Y and Z axes, create a point at the correct location so that we can select the point as our origin later.



Select WCS and then view manager



Select geometry



Rotate your geometry to an approximate position representing its position when mounted to the rotary axis. The first line will represent the X positive direction; the second line will represent the Y positive axis in the new view.



Name the new view, check the box titled set as WCS, click the pick arrow to select a new origin.



Select the point, to become the new origin.



Click the = sign to set your construction plane and tool plane to the new position.


Click isometric view to see the new WCS orientation.



Program the first side in the normal manner; remember Z0 is now at the center of rotation so that the top of stock is at Z positive one inch.





Next we will rotate the construction plane to do side C


Before we do that we need to make it an important change in our configuration file, select settings from the top menu and then configuration.



Select CAD settings and then uncheck the boxes titled update Cplane and Tplane and reset Tplane to top in iso-Gview. When these boxes are checked, they change the construction plane, every time you change your view, this can be very confusing.



Select planes and then rotate planes.


Rotate the plane 90° about the X axis.



Name the new view do not check the box set as WCS.



Remember Z0 is still the centerline of rotation so check your clearance, retract, top of stock and depth values.



Back plot the cut to see the results.



Note that if you downloaded the tutorial file, the geometry came in as surfaces only. I created a solid model from the surfaces and then created wireframe geometry using create curve all edges.
 

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