[CNCweed]

Hi all,

I have a slichtly bended (like an arc) square piece of wood of 100mm by 100mm and 5mm thick. I want to cut a shape out of this with a cnc router and the cut has to be in one go along the edges of the drawing, so not several times back and forth as often 3d shapes are cut out.

What I do now: I made my drawing 2d in Inkscape and imported it as a pdf in Rhino 3d, then I import it as a dxf in Artcam where I generate a Gcode which I import in Mach3 which drives my router.

What I would like to improve:
1. the drawing is still in 2d, so projected on the bended wood means a larger result than wanted. But if I bend it to 3d for example in Rhino, than it seems in Artcam pro that I do not have the option to cut it out in one go anymore. What are my options?

2. Can I simplify this proces as I use quite some programs to get to the result?

Thanks, Ivo

[Kingjamez]

A picture of what your trying to do would really help.

[CNCweed]

Curious what you think!

[austin.mn]

How come you can't just cut the profile?

I must be missing something here...

[Kingjamez]

If your cutter is long enough you can just use a 2d profile to cut it out. Otherwise you'll need to solid model the wood, then you have 2 options. You can also solid model your cut out and do an appropriate 3d machining technique. Or you can do a 2d projection onto the surface of your 3d modeled wood in you CAM software. I don't know the software that you have but Deskproto allows you to overlay a 2d drawing over a 3d surface. From that point you'd do a waterline machine path and it would do exactly what you want. This is fairly easy once you model yor wood piece.

-Jim

[CNCweed]

Hi all, thanks for the replys. The cutter is long enough, so I will try to model the wood in Artcam and to project the 2d drawing on it. I'm very new with it all, so if someone knows a tutorial about how to do this, would be great!

[austin.mn]

If all you need to do is cut a shape out of a warped piece of wood.. then clamp your wood into your machine and measure the overall thickness. Then just use that thickness as your material thickness in Artcam and create your 2d cutout profile toolpath and cut it out.

If you needed to cut a pocket out of your warped piece of wood then that would be a different story, still pretty easy to do in artcam though.

Hope that helps. Have you watched all the artcam tutorial videos that are available? if not just google "Artcam video tutorial" they have a bunch of them.

[RomanLini]

Would it be easier to cut the 5mm thick wood sheet as flat, then steam it and bend it to the desired curve afterwards? That sounds like a better production system to me although it might not suit your needs for this item.