Incredibl
e, but absolutel
y not mine, it's from a swiss watch company and done on a real rose engine. I wish I could do something like that. It's the dial on a probably $10K US watch, no price provided since if you have to ask...
The diamond drag bit came today, and with no preparati
on except changing the collet and thinking half the bit extension was enough (worked out to 5mm "cut depth", really spring compressi
on), at 200mm/min both plunge and feed rate did the attached photo; took about 15 minutes. It's the same 25mm flourishe
d test pattern I've now cut at 0.05 and 0.1mm doc and both 90 and 20 degree vbits. I could hear little thumps where it crossed other lines, but couldn't feel (it's so slow, and non-spinning, I gently held a finger on the cutter) them, and it doesn't appear to have lost any steps. First time the flourishe
s and center detail came out. Pretty good for $50 US, I think, plus it'll engrave on plastic, steel including stainless, and glass from other user's reports. Tried to convince Mrs. Moose that since it was a diamond she could share it as her upcoming birthday present, which worked about as well as you may have expected.
I'm going to try the 96 lobe barleycor
n for grins, then see what lobe count (no idea what the official term is) will give a nice effect.
As always the photo doesn't do it justice, just a 100Weq LED desk lamp at an angle and a cell phone. The original changes as you change your viewing angle, and has a better jeweled effect than my vbit cuts.
Spent a few hours being net beaned and figured out how to run Bill Oombs' open source rose engine simulator on my W10 laptop. It's written in Java, compile your own for non-fruit computers, and a great visualiza
tion (makes me want to look closer at NetBeans) of how the cut will end up. I played with barleycor
n until hauled off to dinner; it allows setting phase and position on every cut. While mostly intended for ornamenta
l turning he does provide a couple PDFs describin
g how to do a spreadshe
et to get the proper manually entered values for a couple popular guilloche patterns. It will provide g code, but for a unique machine Mr. Oombs built that uses (iirc) X, Z, and C and way different cutters (they call them cutting frames, I think what he's calling a drill is a conventio
nal spindle). If I can resurrect my 2000-2002 Java memories I might take a look at his g code generatio
n and see if I can make it produce X-Y-Z code.
There seems to be several technique
s of creating guilloche patterns. There's the spirograp
h emulators, Art's very nice unique style, rose engines with rosettes of unlimited shapes, and geometric chucks (which can also be mounted on a rose engine) which seem to be closely related to spirograp
h patterns. T. S. Bazley's
Index to the Geometric Chuck, published in 1875 where he used one to generate pen and ink drawings of a very large number of patterns and numbered them. Alan Battersby in the UK did a geometric chuck simulator that would reproduce Bazley patterns but his site has gone dark and archive.o
rg doesn't seem to have captured the downloads
. I have it up north, but not currently accessibl
e.
I did say it was a rabbit hole...
Kirk