Milling a small hole in a big sheet

CNC Machines Shapeoko
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I need to mill four paper clip shaped cutouts in a piece of stock shaped like the cross section of a wing (which is exactly what it is). I drew out the cutout (approx 1.5 high by .5 in across) on Shapr3d and exported to Carbide create. I am using a regular Shapeoko, not an XL, etc. I would appreciate help with two issues:

  1. I set the grid spacing on both Shapr3d and CarbideCreate to .5 inches. But when I import the .dxf file to CC, it comes out to be tiny in size. What settings am I missing?

  2. Since I have the smallest Shapeoko, I need to move the 1/16" thick blank to mill each hole. The problem I am having is how to tell CC and CM where the start point should be, and how big I should define the work area as. Ideally, I would like to start milling in the center of the cutout and use that as my toolpath zero. How can I do this?

Thanks

Fred

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  1. Post the DXF
  2. Usually for tiling you’d need to mill a features in the corners to register things.
3

Check out the cool tutorials and resources on tiling that Will referenced at

https://wiki.shapeoko.com/index.php/Fabrication_Techniques_%26_Hardware#Tiling

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