Well, it’s been a minute. I do need a little help with some 3D milling of knife scales. My partner and I received our Shapeoko 5 Pro 4 X 2 last week and we are neck deep into every kind of project. Yesterday I down loaded Create Pro and did my best to produce paring knife scales.
Sizing is spot on but I don’t know how to get the ball nose end mill to roll off the edge and down into the spoil board. I know there is a way but, I figured better get help here rather than spend hours poking and hoping. My file was too large to attach.
Any help would be much appreciated,
Craig
Model thicker, record how much thicker you model it and then in that peice of mdf cut a square the same depth as that extra thickness the size of your bit zero then use that to zero from bottom.
Is there a video showing what you are trying to decribe? I hate to be a pain but this type of 3D programming is messing with my head. Like trying to go from Inventor to SolidWorks.
I think I get it. Do these setting look about right?
The blank is .400 thick, I want the finished scale to be about .200 so I set the Height to .325 and set Z zero .125 below my fixture. Finsh tool is .250 ball nose EM and my geometry was outside offset by .125
So the black is your stock (0.400). And the magenta/pink is the shape you want to end up with.
if you set the stock to 0.400 and model the shape like you did, the tool will end up stopping at the bottom of stock, like the red tool on the right.
You need to add the tool radius to your stock, which represents the area that’s actually below the bottom of your stock. So set the stock to 0.525, create the model 0.200 height, and add a base height of 0.125, and you should get a shape that is the pink & blue combined. Offset your boundary by 0.125 (or a smidge more… 0.130) and the tool will roll around the edge and cut to the bottom of stock in CC. The actual bottom of stock on the machine is 0.125 above that.
So note that the cutter is going to go 0.125 deeper than the bottom of your actual stock. Which means you need something perishable under your stock or you’ll cut into the table.
