specifically the verticals that form at the end of a letter. I don’t see a button to de-select them. They take a good chunk of run time and I’m wondering what my letters and shapes could look like without them; I mean the V-bit is cutting a perfect circular path and the letters I’m working with are all round at the ends.
thx
That is the nature of a vee carve. The vee bit cuts a bevel all the way around. If you dont care about that then do a pocket cut. Depending on your size and font you may have to go down to a 1/32" bit to get small text pocketed. The vee bit can cut pretty small letters but if you are talking very small text a 20/15 degree would be better than a 90/60 degree vee bit.
Here is an example of a 15 degree text vee cut. It is the GLD initials. It cut quite deep because I used the bottom as the max depth. Vee bits cut as deep as necessary to touch both sides of the lines.
This could have been cut with a pocket just as easily.
Unfortunately, the software converts the geometry into polylines, and will sometimes see the resultant angles as worthy of being preserved as sharp corners.
Hopefully a future version will improve on this.
Yes, Will, that is exactly what I am getting. I start with smooth curves, then some operation I do when editing a drawing will convert the curves into polylines, which I can live with because they are short and look right from afar. But then when I V-carve, it will take forever to try to give excess detail into those little angles that weren’t really intended in the first place. Maybe a parameter in the V-carve setting that provided a “minimum radius” for a particular vcarve toolpath that substituted a curve of that radius in exchange for the existing interior angle. (Sorry that was badly worded.) I believe that the larger the radius, the fewer separate cuts are needed in the vcarve. If the parameter was settable per toolpath (like depth) then one could pick and choose and preserve perfect angles where needed, like maybe the inside angles of a square, yet the user could round out the angles where it wasn’t needed (and often not even intended) like maybe some cursive text. The default would be zero, and the operation would work like today, but using a small radius would remove potentially hundreds of angles that cause endless pecking away at cutting time.
I suppose for symmetry, the same minimum radius should be imposed on outside angles so that things like inlays still fit hand in glove.
Even if they remain as curves/smooth when assigned to a toolpath, the toolpath algorithm converts them to polylines.
I think what is needed is a maximum angle. For sharp corners that occur along a smooth curve that has been converted to polylines, the angle is likely close to 180°. Setting a maximum angle for even 170° would eliminate a lot of the unnecessary corner picks.
This topic was automatically closed after 30 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
