Page 386 - Gear Technology Solutions

27.6 Summary

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Pentac Ecoblade-RT cutter heads have to be compared to cutters with rectan-
gular blade cross section. Both systems use radial spacers which allow cover-
ing a wide range of blade point radii with one single cutter head. The spacer
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blocks can be picked from a table presented by the Gleason GEMS software.
In addition, it is possible to select in GEMS from three different blade widths
the smallest possible blade for a certain application. GEMS accepts different
blade sizes for inside and outside slots and shows a computer animation of a
side view and a front view of the finish ground blades. This allows the gear en-
gineer to determine if cutting edge clean up and shoulder balance are optimal
before the first blade is ground.

RT
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The spacer blocks of Pentac Ecoblade cutters are not traditional parallels. In
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order to preserve the advantages of positive seated Pentac blades a newly
invented adaptor prism (spacer block) uses a two-sided wedge seating be-
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tween spacer and cutter head slot and the traditional Pentac seating at the
opposite side. This design provides the highest possible radial and tangential
stiffness. The tangential stiffness transfers the cutting forces through the lower
part of the slot wall into the cutter body.

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Figure 11: Advantages of Pentac Ecoblade-RT cutter heads

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Truing ability is built into the spacer. The Pentac seating in the spacer blocks
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has a ground relief which is identical to the radial relief in Pentac -RT cutter
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slots. In order to increase the overall stiffness of a Pentac Ecoblade-RT cutter
head, the number of blade groups has been reduced depending on the cutter
size by one or two blade groups. Tests have shown that the increase of stiff-
ness and the slightly increased space between blades (no chip packing) in-
creases productivity. Although the common opinion states that two more

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