Check out the ShopBot Indexer

With the CNC router, you are probably primarily acclimated to thinking about XY and Z axis. We can add 1/4 axis to the CNC. I've got an index here on the shop bot desktop machine and think about a LA that is controlled with CNC accuracy. That's what's going on here. So with this, we can do stuff like fluting like this plus a whole lot more. When you look at this, there's all sorts of cool stuff going on using the software. The flutes are evenly spaced around the cylinder. They also ramped from one end to the other. We've got a cove on one end, not on the other. So that very easily could become a table lake or a number of other things. So on this spindle, let's look at cutting a spiral so you can get a fee for how this goes. Um showing this to a friend of mine the way he described it when he saw the video the first time was, it's a little bit like uh rubbing your stomach and patting your head. So kind of keep that in mind as we move in the X and Y and Z, the indexer is also gonna be controlling the rotation on that cylinder as many times as I've seen this run. I just still think the technology is so cool that we're moving in all these different directions. When the bit comes forward, it's centered over the spindle here. And that's what gives it that location from there. We're using the X in this direction and of course, the Z in this direction while the indexer is turning now, a really cool project that I did was making this night for a chess set. Let's have a look at that process and what it takes for the indexer to do that. When you use the CNC for carving, including on an indexer like this, it's pretty common to do a roughing pass first followed by a finishing pass. And it's just what it sounds like. The roughing pass is gonna remove the bulk of the material. The finishing pass is gonna detail it. I'm doing a roughing pass here with a quarter inch ball nose bit. I've watched the indexer a bunch of times, but I'm still really intrigued by what it does. In this case, Y is that zero that centers the bit over the center of the spindle X is left and right. So the bit is fluidly being moved back and forth in the X direction Z as always is our vertical component moving up and down in the Z direction is what's actually doing the carving. And from there. It's just a bunch of rinse and repeat the indexer rotates the spindle just the right amount while the bit moves in the X and the Z, I've sped the action up quite a bit here just to move things along. This is a two bit operation. So once the roughing pass was done, I swapped bits, rezero the Z for this eight inch ball nose and started the finishing tool path. I've again sped up the action. The process of carving on the indexer is admittedly slow. This is well over an hour to carve these two nights. But the beauty of AC NC is that you can push the go button and you can be doing other stuff in your shop while the CNC is doing the work for you. What a great employee as the carving is being created, you'll notice there's a little spigot that connects the horse's head to the base of the adjacent piece that has to be there to keep the whole spindle intact. After the carving comes off the index area, you just cut through that and sand off the waist. When the tool path is complete, back off the tail stock and loosen the chuck and your carving is ready to come off the indexer. The cut quality on this between the tight tolerances on the indexer and the eight inch ball nose bit is absolutely amazing. Very little sanding to wrap this project up. That process gives us this and like I said in that other video part of what's amazing to me, there's no standing on this yet. That cut quality is right off of the eight inch ball nose and the tolerance that we get from using the indexer and the CNC. So with an indexer like this on the shot, but this opens the door to so many more possibilities. We're quickly going from two D to full 3D here. And with the software using Varve Pro, we can easily lay out a number of different rotary designs here. This is such a cool addition to the CNC.