I have been making custom gold jewelry for the last 18 years and have invented a number of tools for use in making wax models. Most of these tools are hand held milling fixtures used to carve wax. For the last few years I have been building a 5-axis computer controlled milling machine. Currently I have three machines running and another under construction.

I wrote the computer routines in "C", designed and built the printed circuit board, built the milling machine - one stage at at time, added bur motors, and grind the cutters.

Currently most of the command files that run the machine are various translations of hpgl plotter files, ie. cylindrical or carteasian reference frames. I am now working on polygon line aligned 5axis translating routines that directly access the cad database. My first mill uses a 10mhz 286 and will drive stepper motors up to 950 pps. My second mill uses a 20 mhz 386dx and will run at 1950 pps. I use 1mm lead screws on some systems and 40 tpi screws on the others. For cutters I use 3/32 drill blanks ground to a three sided 0.3mm diameter point. The cutting length of these cutters is generally 3.0mm. With these cutters both mills have to be slowed down to minimize cutter breakage.

I have started working with the internet this April. Poetry Rings displays text style rings I make with the above milling machines. These rings are designed with special routines I wrote that use a 3D modeling program. The cad output is then processed by other routines to produce mill commands. Then a wax blank is put on the mill and the mill then cuts the text details. Some designs require additional processing on a lathe. Once the waxes are clean, they are invested, burned out, and cast. Polishing the gold completes the rings.

Currently I am experimenting with VRML graphic files. My goal is to make interactive graphic design routines that can be downloaded or run on the web. I hope to generalize the routines to include channel set and prong settings. It looks very promising..... but for now I create the VRML files with the cad and upload them for display.