I’m trying to generate a toolpath for a cabinet door detail and I’m failing. Is there anyone who I can pay a bit of money to, to sort me out?
Greetings from a very cold Central Namibia.
Cabinet door close up.pdf (357.8 KB)
CNC-Cutting.dxf (6.3 KB)
Show the door and describe the difficulty
I really dont quite know how to describe the issues Todd, basicaly I lack the skill set and understanding to create the toolpaths.
It’s difficult to tell the profile of the grooves. That will determine which cutter you use.
If they are round beads, a sharp roundover would make quick work of it.
I’ll use a V-bit for illustration…
First, lay out the curves… they don’t need to be closed curves, as we will just trace each curve with the cutter.
Then assign a contour path with no offset, at the appropriate depth.
If you can show a picture of the entire door, and add some dimensions, we can lay out the whole thing. Spacing of beads, depth of beads, overall sizes of door.
Also, which cutters you have & plan to use…
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For a bit on the difficulties of previewing such tooling see:
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Let me rephrase this.Is there someone I can hire to do this for me? I do not speak the language let alone understand it.
Give me the info I need, and I’ll do it for free, and document it so you follow along & eventually do it yourself. 
“Teach a man to fish!” 
I’ll need:
Stock size: LxWxH
Finished door size
Bead layout & dimensions & shape
Available cutting tools
Which machine & spindle
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Thank you Todd.
Stock is 995mm x 315mm x 22mm
Pine
The decorative area is 650mm tall and 120mm wide, it is essentially a series of “j” shapes nested together.
Here is a better picture of the doors, I hope.
I am looking for the hook “J” design part.
I have vcarve bits and the 13mm round nose bit, which I thought might do a better job on the pine.
The groove should be 8mm deep, with an 8mm space between grooves.
I have a Blue Elephant 1212 not sure of the brand on the spindle but it goes to 18000 rpm and under correction its 3 horse water cooled.
Todd, this might be easier by email.
chris@johnstonnamibia.com
OK, give this a try…
The pattern looked better at 6mm deep.
Here’s the toolpath settings for a contour path
I even tried it at max depth: 4 and 5mm and they looked good.
CJ_door.c2d (328 KB)
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Thank you so much. Its way below freezing this morning, as soon as it warms up in the shop a little I’ll give this file a try.
Really thank you for your kindness.
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Windhoek is saying 48°F (9°C?) right now. You up in the mountains?
It’s 58°F here, but going up to 75°
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Thank you so much! I scaled it back for a test, worked great!!! I have no idea how you created the file, its Majik!
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Majik, math… all a matter of perspective.
I started by counting the grooves across the door. It was 33, so I rounded down to 32, 400/32 = 12.5 spacing.
Make the job setup 650 x 400, with the zero at center left, and set the grid to 12.5mm
Looking at the “J” shape, the center is in the left center edge of the door, so I made a circle from that point at 200mm radius, and 2 lines to trim the circle
Trim the circle, and add straight line segments to cut past the edge of the door.
Join the 3 curves into one, then offset that curve 12.5mm 15 times.
Now for the bottom portion, make a line from the circle center to the lower left edge, 1 grid past the bottom, and use the Linear array to make 32 copies at a spacing of 12.5
Trim the lines on the left to the largest “J”
Now make a line from the right tangent of the large “J”, (the center of the door) to the right, and use linear array again to copy it upward…
Now on the toolpath tab, select all the curves, make a Contour operation with a 60v bit, 8mm deep. I set the depth of cut to 4mm, if you want a finish pass you could set it to 3.9mm or 7.9 if your machine will cut that depth cleanly.
Simulating the toolpath, I think the grooves look a little too deep
So I tried 4,5,6mm and simulated again until it looked proportional
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