Can I clean up a outside contour

How is best to clean up an outside shape cut on the machine?


This takes a large amount of sanding to make into jewelry box grade smoothness from here. Does anyone have any good ideas on this?

Leave a roughing clearance and then take a full-depth finishing pass with a suitable tool — consider an HSS (high speed steel) tool, since steel is more easily sharpened than carbide).

Where possible avoid slotting and add geometry and cut as a pocket

and/or

and consider leaving a roughing clearance and taking a finishing pass.

Looking at your pic of the block, you seem to have a toolpath set for cutting the slot in the middle. So, if you are doing this slot, that would mean you are already laying this block on its side and running an endmill through the block to make this slot. So instead of just running the slot go ahead and run a surfacing bit across each side of the slot location. Leave the tool mark, between both passes, right where your groove slot is cut. This way you will cut out the tooling line on both passes.

Run 3 sides at the depth for cleanup. Then run the next 3 sides at a lower Z zero. This way you can run all the cleanup passes per side without changing the tools out for the slot. Don’t forget to leave extra stock material on your cutout of the hexagon block so you have material to cleanup evenly across each side. Then when you have smoother surfaces and all 6 sides ran, go back and add the slotting endmill and cut your slots in your piece.

This is the way I would do it, but Will may have given a better option as well for your cutting of these blocks.

The answer is never as simple as you think with CNC work is it?
Thank you so much for all this wonderful input!

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