Geometric Modeling and five-axis machining of tire master models

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.