Cavity Manufacturing of Curvilinear Shapes by EDM: Practical Application Through CAM Machining of Electrodes

The focus of this chapter is the realizationElectrodes of a simple cavity in a steel insert for an injectionInjection mold, starting from a handmade design with curvilinear forms using electro-discharge machiningMachining (EDM)EDM. In all processes necessary for the practical manufacturing of this cavity will be used only open source software free of charge. The starting model will be a scanned designDesign that comes from a handmade drawing on paper. A filtering of that image will be performed to prepare it for vectorization, passing the image of bitmap to a path through a trace bitmap software. The image traced will be processed in computer-aided design (CAD) CAD program in which the appropriate electrode will be designed for the EDMEDM process with which is intended to machine the cavity. It will be necessary at this point to know the shape and dimensional requirements of the electrode, for which the erosion conditions will be studied in the machine in which it will be carried out. With a finished electrode designDesign will begin computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) process that allowsCAM treatment that allows obtain the machiningMachining trajectories and conditions that lead to the physical realization of a copper electrode. Finally, the cavities will be machined with the parameters previously defined in the electrode design and thus obtain the final piece.