is there any guide on milling threads, preferably with a single tooth thread mill? I can’t find any mention of it, like it’s some kind of forbidden magic.
I searched for two hours, eventually ending up on this forum, but no one anywhere, on any tutorials had any information on how to do thread milling in Kiri:Moto, or even mentioned if it was a thing or not. I would assume someone would mention it can’t do it if it can’t, or complain, but there are no complaints, and it’s missing from hour-long guides, not even noted. On these forums, there are 0 posts for “thread mill”, “thread milling”, “threads” (that aren’t mentioning a set of posts), “threaded” (that isn’t talking about multithreading), and 0 posts mentioning “threaded hole”.
I’m confused.
I don’t get the feeling this is a very niche feature, and it’s becoming more common, to the point that even Freecam can do it, if you know the tricks… I was referred to Kiri:moto, though, and I do like the interface (though the lack of a right click menu or right click select is a bit awkward but I digress), and it seems to have most everything else, even tabs and dogbones!
Apologies again- I’m a new user, and perhaps I’m being silly and missing something, but I can’t find the end mill for it either, which leads me to believe the feature just… isn’t there? as I said, I have trouble believing I would be recommended to this software for metal milling CAM if threaded parts aren’t a feature. They don’t exactly seem complicated, tracing a spiral around the edges of a known cylinder, then going back up in the other direction (and maybe adding a bevel by tracing a circle with the same tool if you wanna be fancy) seems relatively straightforward, especially when considering that some “canned gcode lookup table” could probably handle all the standard threads if you have the right thread mill.
Thanks for the question. I’m sorry the lack of docs caused you confusion. That’s an area we’re working on.
If anyone is looking at this in the future, All of the cam operations are in the CAM docs, and you can look there for updates.
As far as I know, we don’t currently have a way to add a thread mill toolpath. I’m adding arc support to the code right now, and once that’s done, helical toolpaths are totally on my todo list.
I agree that it doesn’t seem super difficult, but full support would require a pretty substantial overhaul of the tool system and animate feature. Both of which work off of a pinscreen approach, not a voxel-based one. Because of this, undercutting is fundamentally impossible in animate right now.
TLDR: Thread milling is currently not supported. Helical toolpaths are on the horizon, which could be used for thread milling, but they will probably be janky and not supported in animate for a while.
sorry for insinuating it would be easy, I made an edit but passed out before submitting it once I browsed the source code and understood some more. I figured out that both the lack of arc support and undercut-capable bits were totally kneecapping threadmilling. I didn’t see that the system only sees via heightmap or similar, and that’s also very hard to change, seeing how much relies on it- and translating more robust systems to that in an attempt not to change the operations oozes technical debt.
as far as that kind of thing goes, approaching it from a top-down perspective doesn’t seem wrong, exactly… In all honesty, if you just treat a thread mill as a mill with the thread’s inner diameter, and spiraled down, that would work fine. If you wanted a super robust system, though, then you’re definitely going to need some sort of generalized system for undercuts at least.
Also, I mentioned that a stopgap way to do it might be to have some gcode for standard threads. There’s already a gcode insert operation, so putting a “standard thread” button, allowing it to snap to and insert at the center of a cutout or hole would be cool! For example, an M6 thread will always have a pitch of 1mm, and always be using a tool with that pitch and m6 thread depth, whether it has one tooth or twenty.
still, not the ideal of something like a reverse slicer that “unprints” whatever “isn’t the part”
I see, okay, a voxel method does seem really nice for the animate feature… but is it really needed for toothed bits? or do you only need it for toothed bits to work in animate? I don’t use animate. Animate is a cool feature, though without a solid understanding of it or need for it, I can’t really say much. just being able to see a 3D representation of the tool as it follows the path, and a line for the toolpath, is enough for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIOWaCoTWg I saw this when researching how to make my own gcode for it… and perhaps you could co-opt this guy’s algorithm into your own gcode output? it looks pretty robust, and even has moves to gracefully enter, leave, and round off the ends of the threading operation. he goes over everything from the variables, to the math behind the helical arc moves, assuming you’re using gcode- but with an arc function you should be able to do the same basic “sweep in” algorithm with splines or toolpaths too.