This topic has been revisited several times since 2021, so it appears to be one that people want and just deal with the work rounds. I am hoping that my take on this might change some people’s minds.
I have a McFly bit that I use to surface my glue ups because my planer isn’t wide enough for items that I build. Each glue up is a different size, so each time I have to do the saw tooth pattern on each size of the panel. At a 1/2" pass, it takes a while which is time wasted, and I am not making money.
I offer a few proposals for this feature request. The first might be the simplest.
Add a checkbox or drop down to the pocketing tool path where you can choose, “Move Outward from Center” or “Move Inward from Outside”. This will allow us to create a pocket that is slightly oversized for the work item and allow the bits to not be jammed into the center of the stock and extend the bit’s lifespan.
Add a checkbox or drop down to the pocketing tool path where you can choose “Spiral” or “Saw tooth”. The “Saw tooth” would start at one side of the pocket and go back and forth based on the stepover of the bit. This too would allow us to create a pocket that is slightly oversized and allow the bit to come in from the side of the stock. This would also allow you to create a duplicate pocket with a different pattern allowing to clean up tool marks and reduce sanding time for normal pocketing operations.
Create a drawing tool where you create a box, tell it the gap between lines similar to the Array tools and it will fill the box with a line path that passes back and forth. You could even have an option to do “Left to Right” and “Up and Down”.
Now I realize this all would take significant development time, but I would be good if this was a Pro version feature. It would make the Pro version more useful for me as I currently only use it for doing oversized stock. I don’t really use the 3D feature.
Hopefully, this gets serious consideration. If you are reading this post and see the benefit, comment on the post so that Carbide3D can get a truer sense of how valuable this feature would be to their community. Even comment if you don’t think you would use it. I just want to see some traction on a feature like this since there could be more benefits besides the surfacing of stock.
I sometimes use different surfacing bits than the McFly. Also, depending on the grain direction, a saw tooth pass would require less sanding.
One thing I didn’t mention was that I make end grain cutting boards and the direction of cut makes a big difference in how much sanding has to be done. It all comes back to “Time is money”
There’s a “Spindle Speed (RPM)” input box that will add an M3 Snnnnn after an initial move to Z10 and an M5 at the end of the job. Were you looking for something else?
