5 axis machining with LinuxCNC:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-OYB5KCrqk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-OYB5KCrqk
Zowie. That’s amazing.
I’m looking for software to do more-than-three-axis contouring. Suggestions?
I don’t know any open source CAM that handles more than 3 axes… 
Me neither. I’m willing to pay, as a result, so then I’m wondering what works reasonably well without me having to sell a kidney to afford it.
Commercial CAM costs one kidney for the base package plus one kidney for the 5-axis add-on. Per seat, per year.
I used to work at a place that used MasterCAM, and it seemed to work well. I never worked with it directly, and we never made any 5-axis parts. But our machinist made great 4-axis parts with it.
I liked mastercam when my company paid for it but I was only doing 2axis stuff with it. We didn’t spring for the higher packages because it already cost so much it made our accountant sob.
@John_Bump Ages ago, I was trying to do 5 axis stuff. It is quite difficult, and the solid modeling package that I was using (OCC) had/has a lot of bugs. A few pics: http://code.google.com/p/cam-occ/wiki/OldScreenShots
I got started with OCC after seeing Olivier Coma’s stuff. He had some 5 axis stuff, using Jacobian matrices. It looks impressive, but I absolutely did not understand it. Scroll down about 1/3 on this page, to Optimal Controller for a 5-axis Machine Tool: http://olivier.coma.free.fr/opencascade/opencascade.html
I’ll spend some time working my way through that: thanks!
I purchased the multi axis edition of +Deskproto but they only do pseudo 4 axis (X, Z, A and not move Y).
What about post processing 3 axis(X, z, a) Päckchen g-code to add movements for the y axis (and add respective offsets to a, x) to follow the surface normal?
Then next step, skip this for movements that would cause a collision.
Or do indexed 3 axis milling without having to calculate the new location and orientation of the part after rotating it in A and/or B before doing the next face.