[denala]

Hi all. I'm a cabinetmaking student with an issue that stumped my teachers, and I'm wondering if anyone out there who has more experience with BiesseWorks will have a better solution.

We use SketchUp to draw the cutting pattern and export it to dxf to open it in BiesseWorks. The things we are cutting are all components, with no machining like shelf pin holes or rebates, and no voids or anything on the inside. Then we select all the component lines and right-click import as geometry. Now on the right panel, we can see the geometry with little arrowheads that either point clockwise or counterclockwise around the part. We take a sheet of paper and mark down which parts are "clockwise", and which are "counterclockwise", and then we delete the geometry, and re-import as geometry all of the clockwise parts as one group, and all of the counterclockwise parts as another group. Then, we do our milling from geometry for one of those, and we check whether the tooling path is cutting on the outside of the line or the inside, and we make it cut on the outside because it's a component. And then we duplicate that milling from geometry, assign it to the other geometry, and set the CRC Correction to the opposite side, so that both toolpaths now go on the outside of every component.

I attached an image to help explain!

I hope that makes sense. Essentially, the problem the teachers ran into was that if they just imported all the components at once and added a milling from geometry, the toolpath would cut inside one component, and outside another, with no discernable logic at all! But one of them realized that the little arrows that you see when you import the geometry actually relate, for some reason, to whether BiesseWorks will try to cut on the inside or the outside of your geometry. So that's the workaround they teach, now: import all the geometry at once as a test, and then check the arrows, and then import each group separately.

My question for the CNC lovers out there who use BiesseWorks: is there a better way? It seems strange and arbitrary - I would love to be able to communicate to BiesseWorks that all of the geometries I'm importing should be cut on the outside (counterclockwise arrows), and just select all my geometries and import them as one. Is there a setting somewhere for this, or a special way to import the geometry?

This issue gets compounded when you do have voids inside your pieces, like for a ring-shaped component, or if you want to program shelf-pin holes or rebates. Because those are all geometries that you want to cut on the inside (clockwise arrows), and they're often tiny, so now you're using the zoom feature to figure out which way the arrows are pointing, which is all clunk and no finesse.

~Tell me there's a better way!~ If we can find a solution I will go straight to my teachers so that all graduating classes will have this knowledge and it will save literally hours of our time futzing around.

Thank you for reading! <3