So I’m trying to make a “stained glass” type effect with epoxy instead of glass. I cut all my outline first and filled with black epoxy to give the lead seam affect. Now I’m wondering how I can split my drawing up into the segments created by the black lines. Seems like there should be an easy way of doing this but I haven’t figured it out yet. See attached pic for what I have so far and the sections that now need to be created and pocketed out.
Can do when I get home. Basically the Vt and beer pint are outline drawings I imported and then I added the lines making the segments. It’d be great if there was a way I could outline a segment and adjust the size a little and cut it out, but guessing it’s not that easy. Thanks
It may require a little vector editing beyond the scope of what CC can do, but nothing that a few minutes in Inkscape can’t fix I guess.
If I understand correctly, you want to clear out the bamboo within the black lines. The difficulty I see is that you will likely need to use a very small diameter endmill to get inside those sharp inside corners and in the space between the glass and the beer.
Do you have small endmills that will have a long enough length of cut? How deep did you intend your pockets to be ? If you’re going for the stained glass look I guess you want to pocket through to the bottom?
Pocketing with a small endmill will take forever too, and CC unfortunately does not support rest machining yet, so chances are you’ll need to either be patient or be ready to artificially add geometry to create a first set of pocketing toolpaths for a large endmill, and then a second second set of pocketing toolpaths with the small endmill to clear out the rest.
Anyway that sounds like a cool technique,I’m looking forward to seeing the end result!
you can do a trick where you clear the main area with a large endmill, and then do a series of contours with smaller (no more than half previous) to step down… you get more or less rest machining behavior that way
I do have a few 2 mm endmills however the wood that your speaking of in the glass is going to stay. I’m just to clear out the other larger pockets. I think I can get them cleared out with a 1/8" mill. Basically I’m curious if I can edit the lines in the state outline to create the segment sections.
Attached is my file. vt stained glass.c2d (74.0 KB)
Thanks for the help it’s very appreciated.
Is any wood intended to be left after this outline cutting? If not, could you somehow pop the resin frames out of the wooden ‘mould’ rather than cut the wood away?
Never thought of that but boy that would be a lot faster. May have to give it a try. Guessing since I didn’t apply a releasing agent of any sort this time around it may not be feasible.
If you want to do that it might be worth using one of the tapered ballnose carving bits to leave a slight angle on the walls to give your wood mold a ‘draw angle’
My hunch is that @WillAdams will be able to vector this out in about 2 minutes. He’s probably already prepared a tutorial showing how to do it very efficiently as well!
