• IE interfaces
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.129-141
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• 1996

Recently, the tire mold of a passenger car is made almost via aluminum casting, and it is necessary to prepare a master model of the tire for the casting. Because of the geometrical feature of tire, as well known, the master model must be machined by a 5-axis NC machine. The paper proposes a procedure to model and machine the master model. The approach includes (a) transformation of 2D drawing of tire into 3D geometry, (b) modeling surfaces of tire, and (c) inverse kinematics of a 5-axis NC machine. An implementation of the proposed procedure is also presented.

• International Journal of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.75-78
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• 2008

Tire molds are manufactured by aluminum casting, direct five-axis machining, and electric discharging machining. Master models made of chemical wood are necessary if aluminum casting is used. They are designed with a three-dimensional computer-aided design system and milled by a five-axis machine. In this paper, a method for generating and machining a tire surface model is proposed and demonstrated. The groove surfaces, which are the main feature of the tire model, are created using a parametric design concept. An automatically programmed tool-like descriptive language is presented to implement the parametric design. Various groove geometries can be created by changing variables. For convenience, groove surfaces and raw cutter location (CL) data are generated in two-dimensional drawing space. The CL data are mapped to the tread surface to obtain five-axis CL data to machine the master model. The proposed method was tested by actual milling using the five-axis control machine. The results demonstrate that the method is useful for manufacturing a tire mold.