Vee Carving

[dirktheeng]

I'm a woodworker and a machinist.  I use my CNC router often and I LOVE Fusion 360.  I would love for you guys to impliment a v-carving capability.  I have done it in Fusion 360 using a consistent width font and a fixed draft angle whith a cut into a body.  This gives me the edges to select and trace.  However, this method does not work with fancy fonts because the extrude/cut fails.  Plus it's a pain to go in and select everthing all the time.

Can you guys go look at v-carve pro and impliment some similar functionality?  I really don't think this would be super hard to do as there are methodical ways to define the paths from any shape.  Then I wouldn't need to spend a lot of money and juggle two software packages to create nice lettering for my projects.  Further, you can do very awesome inlay with a v bit.  I've done it before with Vectric's products.

Can you add this to your roadmap plans?

[schneik-adsk]

This was added as part of your November 2015 update. Thanks for your suggestions.

[gruvin]

Howdy

I have the Nov update, with the Engraving CAM option. But I cannot get it working.

Firstly, it seems that the only tool type you can use is a chamfer mill, which although it has a single "blade", does not match the physcial profile of V-carving tools for wood ...

The countersink tool is the only tool that I can get to match the actual profile of my V-carve tool ...

... though clearly, one does not carve with one of those.

The Tapered Mill tool seemed like anothe rpotential fit. But the shoulder on that is not vertical.

- - - -

Tool selection asside ...

... when I do use the chamfer tool, I just keep getting this error ...

Error: Internal CAM kernel error. Please report through your support channel.

Here is what I'm trying to do ...

The blue text is a plain sketch.

I've tried various things for Top and Bottom, all with the same results. That bottom height of "-0 mm" is just the default. I would have thought th Top Height should be the stock top and the bottom height should be selected contours, not the other way around? Tried that too of course. No change to the result.

Has anyone else out here managed to get this working. If so, what am I missing?

Thank you most kindly.

Bryan.

[frankTMJQD]

It looks like it doesn't work with all font types. Try to select regular "Arial", make it bold and then try to do the same. Would be neat if it was possible to see what fonts it was possible to use and what didn't work without trial and error since that does take some time ^^ 

[Anonymous]

This seems to be a method to do the v cut engraving, is there any way to do inlays?  This will cut the negative into the wood, is there a way to make an inverse part out of another material that would fit in that v groove?

I am wondering if a bevel outline cut with the same shape might be able to do it?  Has anyone tried this with fusion 360?  Is there any instructions out there?  My CNC is backordered so I cannot experiment myself yet.

[Helmi74]

@Anonymous i didn't do that technique ever before so maybe i just don't get it right but couldn't you just model such a inlay in fusion and then mill it like you would mill every other pocket and piece?

[Anonymous]

How would you do that with sharp edged  text that also contains curves and such?  Basically I would need a chamfer around all the text, including points and splines and I just get errors anytime I try that.  The inverse of the pocket cut by this engraving is a pretty complicated shape that I don't know how to make.

Is there any way to run a CNC simulation and then convert the finished stock geometry into a solid object?  Because then I could get it with a subtract operation...

[Helmi74]

@Anonymous like I said i don't know what you are aiming for but doing chamfers and radiuses isn't a big problem in modelling. Why not try modelling that first? You could still do boolean operations in modelling.

There's no way to convert results of a CNC simulation to solids AFAIK.

[Anonymous]

I am looking for the inverse male inlay piece, it is not a simple task at all to model it.  You can't make it with just chamfers because to my knowledge you cannot chamfer splines and tight angles.

Basically I am looking to be able to do the male part, like you can do in vcarve at about 15:20 in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4992bEoNYI  

Can fusion do this yet?  I have no idea how to do it. My experiments at making the inverse part are crashing the program, probably user error because I don't know what I am doing.

Another thing to show what I want, is I want the inverse of the text in this stl (I found that fusion can actually export an stl of the stock, but it is a mesh, not a solid)