[d3ath101]

Hello, I will be active as of today. I have a problem. I want to create a soap dish for my mothers store. I will be selling these, modifying them, making cool designs on them, but i have no idea what I am doing. My basic soap dish is straight forward. I used Sketchup to make a 3d of it. (i don't no if i did it correctly, but it looks good). (Dimensions are 3.5"x2"x.625) But when I export to either dxf or stl, I cannot seem to get pycam or meshcam to do what I want with it. I uploaded the .dxf of it. It is so simple, yet I cannot get it to correct gcode. Can someone please explain to me the steps, so I can learn them.

I have a homemade cnc router (12"x12"x6" cutting area) using a porter cable 6902 single speed router (25k rpm) with a single flute 1/4 end mill.
I plan on milling these soap dishes out of a simple 1x4 that is 12" long. that gives me about 4-5 soap dishes per board.

[mmoe]

Are you able to open the file in Meshcam? If so, is this what it's supposed to look like?

The DXF is not a 3d object, but rather it's a 3d line drawing. In other words, there isn't anything between the lines to establish a surface. As far as I know, Meshcam will not use a file like this. I brought the DXF you provided into Viacad, then extruded the profile into a 3d solid. I then saved the solid as an STL for use in Meshcam. You can use both ASCII and Binary STLs with Meshcam, but I do find that for some reason there are times when Binaries don't work, so I tend to stick to ASCII. If you are not able to open the STL from Sketchup, it may just be that the STL is not written in a way that works well with Meshcam. I don't use Sketchup, so I can't really give any advice other than to get a CAD application like ViaCAD 2d/3d. If you're on a budget, you can buy Viacad in a one year outdated version (version 8), which is still plenty functional, for about $25-$50 and it will probably provide more functionality for CAD/CAM than you'll get from Sketchup.

Once you get the model into Meshcam, post again and we can figure out what you need to do to machine it. A lot depends on your machine, tooling you have available, and the general approach you want to take. Another thing to keep in mind is that this really would have been a better product to cut in 2d since it's just straight cuts. There is software called EstlCAM which is inexpensive and easy to use for 2d operations and I think is now supporting 3d as well. Meshcam is great for 3d work, but I find it a little cumbersome to use for 2d operations personally. If it's what you have, then you may as well give it a shot.

I threw in the STL I generated in case the STL is your issue. You will need to unzip the folder first.