Tips for 2.5D carving/free sources for 2.5D models?

CNC Machines Shapeoko
1

I’ve been trying to do some 2.5D carving, they’ve turned out really well, but they take a really long time to do. Currently working on a 18"x6" sign with a rope border and even with hogging out the main material with a 1/4" EM, the 1/8" BN finishing carve is calculated to almost 5 hours long. Does anybody have any good tips to pass along for this kind of operation? Calculating the optimum step-over, using a larger BN, that sort of thing?

Also, does anybody have a good source for 2.5D models? Particularly looking for a nice fairy to make a jewelry box for a little girl. The one in the Aspire clipart is creepy looking lol

2

Start with testing the feeds and speeds and working out the optimal rates for your material on a piece of scrap:

https://precisebits.com/tutorials/calibrating_feeds_n_speeds.htm

Then work out a balance between the roughing pass and finishing pass — one possibility is to cheat this by doing 3 passes using MeshCAM using two files. First is roughing and a finishing pass with a medium-sized endmill, second is the pass with the medium-sized endmill (suppressed) and a second finishing pass with a smaller endmill

There are some clipart sites listed at: https://www.shapeoko.com/wiki/index.php/Online_resources#Clipart

The various coloured books from Andrew Lang are in the public domain, as are the original woodcut illustrations — perhaps there’s something helpful in one of those?

1 Like
3

I’m not sure what you mean. Do you mean to hog out the main material with a 1/4" EM with a large DoC running at a slower speed, then use the same EM to fine tune the rough cut with a smaller DoC but at a higher feedrate, then run the small BN quickly over the whole thing to take off what’s left?

I was considering trying 1/4" EM with a 1/8" DoC, a 1/4" BN finishing pass, and 1/8" BN finishing pass.

4

I wrote it up somewhere, and tried it on a test file a while back.

  • 1/4" square endmill for roughing
  • 1/4" ball-nosed endmill for first finishing pass
  • repeat that as the first pass in a second MeshCAM file
  • 1/8" ball-nosed endmill for second finishing pass

It may be that there’s a better way to do that in MeshCAM — still learning it myself.

1 Like
5

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.