Can I clean up a outside contour

[Pan (Andy photenas)]

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?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

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

Making vacuum hose adapters

While cutting up vacuum extension wands for this is expedient, it’s a bit problematic given that Shop Vac recently filed for bankruptcy, was bought at the last minute, and production hasn’t caught up. I need a receptacle for the Sweepy 2.0 dust fitting — one option would be to purchase one from Woodcraft, but Carbide 3D sells blocks of HDPE: which looks to be just barely big enough for things to fit. Measuring the hose fitting I get a diameter of ~63.5mm — offsetting that twice we arrive at…

and/or

Adding geometry to cut as a pocket with a finishing pass

One technique which is often suggested to avoid slotting is to add geometry around a part which one wishes to cut out and cut as a pocket down to tab depth — here’s one technique for that. In this case, the project is a bevel gauge which will be cut out of 0.0625" (~1.5mm) thick aluminum: [bevelgauge] Due to the narrowness of the angles, an 0.03125" endmill has to be used, so after importing and scaling the file (we will be cutting out one which is 3") we select the perimeter and offset it tw…

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

Best Bit for full cut through

One which has a cutting flute length equal to or greater than the thickness of the stock — pretty much any tool should work. Big thing is the toolpaths — if cutting out, rather than just cutting a slot: [image] Offset to the outside by endmill diameter plus 10% or so: [image] [image] [image] Then cut as a pocket: [image] down to tab height or the penultimate pass: [image] then move the contour down to below the pocket and start cutting at the bottom of the pocket: [image] and…

[Bigsmooth911 (Eli Smith)]

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.

[Pan (Andy photenas)]

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