Help with Boolean Union

[275Heartland (Cory Trischler)]

Hello.
I got my Shapeoko a couple years back. I completely bypassed Carbide Create at that time and used Fusion 360 for all my modeling and programming. This was not too difficult because I am very used to working in 3D parametric modeling programs. The problem is Fusion 360 is cumbersome for simple signs and is very lacking when it comes to text.

Now my problem… I am diving into Carbide Create and I am having some trouble with the Boolean Union operator. You can see in the picture attached that the original geometry is on the left. I am trying to create the geometry all the way to the right. How do I do this in one operation? In order to get the desired geometry on the right I had to have two rectangles and first do a subtraction of the inner circle and the rectangle and then do a union of the outer geometry. This forces me to have two rectangles though. Is there a way around this? I am working on a stacked text sign and it would be nice not to have to do a separate subtraction for all the inside curves in letters (an “e” for example).

Thanks for the help.

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

You need to do two separate operations — but first, duplicate the bar:

and drag it back into registration w/ the original:

• Select the circle and one copy of the bar by shift-clicking on the bar so that it is the key object (dashed highlight) and Boolean Subtract:

• Select the remaining bar and the circle and Boolean Union:

which yields the desired geometry:

The problem is, Carbide Create doesn’t have a concept of composite paths, so one has to do multiple steps for each winding of what would be a composite path in other programs.

[gdon_2003 (Guy Donham)]

Boolean is still a mystery to me some times. I have learned as Will suggested to do multiple unions to get to the end.

[275Heartland (Cory Trischler)]

Thanks Will. Yeah - that is exactly what I ended up doing.