The Header Exhaust Ring in 2½ Axis
This project comes to us from Rex Smith out of Portland OR. Rex was a Corporate Vice President of MSN® Operations at Microsoft until his retirement in 2002 and served as COO of the startup Hotmail.com, co-founded by Rex’s son Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia in 1996. Read more about Rex Smith below and from his complete case study here. Read more about Rex Smith and his complete case study here.
These stainless-steel rings measuring 4.625” diameter were machined for a local custom rod shop. They are connectors to mate an exhaust system to the engine headers. Rex designed the parts to spec using Rhino. He cut the ring blanks on his manual lathe and then used RhinoCAM’s stock from selection feature, 2½ Axis operations and Drilling & Tapping to complete the mill work.
The first MOpSet called Roughing in the Machining Job shown below contains two 2½ Axis Pocketing operations to rough out the 6 circular slots and 6 circular pockets. The second MOpSet contains 2½ Axis Profiling operations used to finish cut all 12 pockets. The third MOpSet contains operations to Center Drill, Tap Drill and then Clockwise Tap the 6 mounting holes.
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| The Machining Job contains three MOpSets (Machining Operation Sets), each contains 2½ Axis roughing, finishing as well as Drill and Top operations. | |
More about Rex Smith
Rex Smith graduated from Oregon State University in 1971 with a BSEE, and received his MSEE from Stanford in 1976. Rex was added to their College of Engineering Hall of Fame in 2006 when they wrote: “Rex’s history at Hotmail is substantial. He was the fifth person to join the company and served as chairman of the board and chief operating officer. He was instrumental in developing the infrastructure, operations, and network of Hotmail. Before Hotmail, Rex worked with various companies including FutureTel, Hewlett-Packard Co., Apple Computer Inc., and Sun Microsystems. He was also involved with several start-up companies and served as an entrepreneur in residence at OSU.”
Read more about Rex Smith and his complete case study here.
