Poll: How to handle tabs on through cuts

For reasons that aren’t particularly important here, I wish to put tabs on a cut that goes well past the bottom of the stock.

For concreteness, lets assume stock 5mm thick, and a cut 6mm deep.

If a tab is 2mm thick, how should CC position it vertically?

  • Anchor to bottom of cut (current behavior). Tab is 1mm thick when done.
  • Anchor to bottom of stock. Tab is 2mm thick when done, but involves the last 3mm of cutting.
  • Same as current behavior except if tab is fully below stock remove it completely.

0 voters

I’m unclear on your question - Are you asking how it does work or how we think it should work?

How we think it should work.

In that case, if you don’t mind the suggestion, another option is to have the ability to define the cut depth of the top of the tab, instead of just the thickness of the final tab. Seems like a more direct approach and makes it simpler to figure out the depth in your example.

That is also an excellent option, but it seems I can’t add to the poll. So, upvote that comment if you like that option!

For me the thickness of the tab is the only important value, since it has support the piece but also to be cut and trimmed easily.

Knowing how far from the top of the stock the tab starts is not really interesting, and I don’t want to have to adjust that offset for the tabs when I change the thickness of the stock.

Your new (second) option is not universally useful, where as the first option is. Specifically, it fails when you are doing two-sided machining and the second side is the one where you want to have tabs. You might only be cutting 4mm into to top of a 12mm bit of stock that has had the other 8mm removed from the other side.

So, what if it was like today’s but just didn’t go past the bottom of stock no matter what the cut depth was? “At most stock depth as bottom”.

That would be an okay restriction, but is probably better as a warning. Cutting below the stock is a deliberate action in this case, and compensating for the extra 1mm is easy enough to do if you know how the tab depth is calculated.

Gerry - That is a relevant use case that I hadn’t considered. Thank you for expanding on the options.

I’ve appreciated the description plugin for Cura slicer (3D printing) and F360’s baked in function of hover-and-you-will-see-a-description/graphic-with-useful-information. I would have wrongfully assumed it anchored to the stock since I generally put tabs when I’m through cutting to the spoil board. Now, it makes sense that it is relative to the cut since we generate the tab in specific toolpaths.

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It only occurred to me because I have one type of toolpath that does this. It’s for a small (6mm) fitting in aluminium that resembles a ‘top hat’. I cut the hat-like shape on one side then turn it over to cut the hole (where the head would go if it was a hat) and then do a tabbed cut right at the surface so I can then free the shape.

I do it in this order since the blue tape and glue with the “surface-tabs” are enough to hold the item in place if I do it one way, but not if I do it the other way since the underside has a profile that the tape won’t stick to.

Looks like the consensus is pretty solidly on “Keep current behaviour”, with maybe a warning if the tab is not entirely within the stock. I’ll close the poll.

Should be pretty straight forward. Just set the depth of cut so it cuts all the way through, and below the bottom of the stock as desired. Then adjust the Tab Height so it still catches the actual bottom of the stock.

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Of course you can fiddle with it manually. The question was really should the computer do it automatically?

The computer needs to know what’s expected. But we the users are the variable and expect different things.

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