I’m working on a jewelry box in oak and I’ve noticed that if my Shapeoko cuts in the same direction as the grains, then I don’t get those ugly lines in the bottom of the wood.
That makes me wonder whether I can do the final pass of a pocket with a facing operation (I’m using Fusion 360)? I’m roughing the below pocket down to 0.2mm of the pocket bottom and I’m want to do the final pass along the grain of the wood:
It doesn’t seem like it’s possible to use the face operation, since it extends beyond the pocket and if I set a stock offset of -3mm, then it simply cuts in the buttons (the ones that are sticking up in the pocket).
Any suggestions on what to do? Right now I’m using a 3D pocket operation for the final pass, but would like to control the direction of the endmill.
I suppose you also tried the facing op on a selection that includes both the outer profile of your pocket AND the circular boundaries of your five buttons? (using a projection on a sketch if need be). I can’t test right now, I would not be surprised if the facing op did not honor the excluded areas.
I can’t remember if facing ops have the “don’t touch this surface” option in their settings?
VCarve has a nice “raster” option for pocket toolpaths that does exactly this, but Fusion360…I don’t know.
I’ll be watching this thread with interest for the answer.
trick it by creating offset circles slightly larger than your buttons ?..but then the overlap between the surface pass and the button finishing pass may not be completely smooth I guess.
It definitely doesn’t seem like a hack’ish kind of solution. It seems weird to me that Fusion 360 doesn’t have an operation like this. Seems like something that people would want to do from time to time?
If you NEED to do it this way, I’d draw a sketch with lines representing my toolpath and use a Trace operation. That said, I like @gdon_2003’s solution better.
Seems like that might be the only way. Now the question is how I do it in Solidworks. I’m using Solidworks for making the design and only use Fusion 360 for making the cutting program.
Solidworks has a split line function, but it doesn’t work for open contours. I don’t know if there’s a way of including a sketch when exporting from Solidworks and importing to Fusion 360?
I do edits in the design in Solidworks and then import to Fusion. If I have to create a new sketch and such each time I do an edit to the design, it seems like it’s going to be quite a hassle.
Maybe I’m missing something but can’t you use the 3D Parallel operation after roughing out the pocket? You can select the pass direction to match the wood grain and specify “Avoid surfaces” if you don’t want it to touch the buttons.
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