For a no offset contour cut is there a way to change the direction?
The reason I ask is that I am cutting a small line with a v bit into traffolyte and I have found that I get a really nice finish if I do the cut one way followed by the other way at the same depth.
So I’d like to duplicate the line and have it carve it the opposite way.
Ben
Unfortunately the only control Carbide Create offers for this is inside/outside profile, so you’d need to offset the path so that it would make the pass in the other direction — Carbide Create doesn’t make that simple to do.
If you are using a tool which allows you to create open paths and reverse their direction and import them into Carbide Create (you’d probably need to add additional nodes at the beginning and end of the paths) you could use a pair of no-offset contours.
Not familiar with this material — do you not get an adequately nice finish with a roughing clearance and a finishing pass?
So as I am creating simple lines in this case with the polygon tool, I figured out I can actually just trace back over the line and then its fine.
Clearly this won’t work with imports, but thats ok for this project.
Traffolyte is a hard plastic bonded in 2 colours (normally 3 layers, like White, Black, White), you remove the top colour to reveal the middle one. I’ts used a lot in electrical switch panel labels etc.
It comes in various names, so you may well know it as something else, here is a picture :
I have been playing a bit to work out speeds and what not. I found the double reverse pass works well because I was engraving text with a single line font that reverses itself to be a closed font that behaves correctly.
It might well be that I find a good spindle / feed rate that works well with a single pass.