Before I go and drop 300 bills on vCarve Desktop, has anybody got a method for doing vcarve inlays (the cavity+plug style) with Carbide Create? Every tutorial and demo I can find use’s the vectric software…
In theory it should just be matter of the correct offset paths — we’ve had some discussion of it here in the past:
Inlay Work (Woodworking) — though that was mostly straight, but the principles are the same.
F-Engrave has added inlay support: http://scorchworks.com/Fengrave/fengrave.html including V-carving.
If you use Adobe Illustrator, you may want to look into: https://amazoncanvas.com/
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Holy smokes, that’s a great vid and resource, thanks Will! I’ll give that a spin tonight.
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Ok, gave this a crack last night. F-engrave is not bad for what it is. In fact, considering it’s just a big python script it’s pretty impressive. That being said, with 3 attempts I could not get great results with it. It’s vcarve calculations seem a bit off, as I could never get really square interior corners, nor tight fits (even by faking the tool diameters)
Additionally, certain width paths seem to confuse it a bit. For example, if I wanted to vcarve “hollow” an area about 3/16" wide to a depth of 1/32, it would make two passes on each interior edge, but then not recognize the need to hollow the middle with a cleanup tool.
I suspect with adequate time fiddling with it I could get decent results from it, but as part of a sustainable workflow, probably not for me. I guess I’ll be giving vectric a bunch of cash :-/ Thanks for the advice all the same though, @WillAdams!
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