Engrave contour lines.

[sailhatin]

when engraving along a contour line should the v bit stay on the side of your contour line or does it break that line? thanks in advance. JC

[ian1196]

Sorry, I have never had any luck with engrave in Fusion360. I use a 25 year old BobCad for engraving.

[HughesTooling]

Fusion uses a V cutter for engraving and maintains 2 points of contact. 

In the example below, in the narrow sections the tool touches both sides but where the arrows point the maximum depth and an edge are used. Fusions engrave (V Carve) only works in enclosed profiles and the profile should be selected at the top face.

[drd_808]

Don't use the engrave strategy. It works sometimes but it's buggy and there's a much easier way.

Use 2d contour. Select your lettering using face selection on 2nd tab. Then on the 4th tab click compensation drop down (wear, in machine, in computer, etc) on the 4th tab and change it to "off" then on the 5th tab make all leads 0 (lead in/out, radius, all of them) and that's it. It'll have the center of your tool follow along all lines in the text.

Oh and make sure the "keep tool down" box is unchecked on the 5th tab.

This is 10x better than any other way I've found to engrave and also easier to control than the engrave strategy if you end up needing to for some reason

[sailhatin]

Interesting.  Here’s my question about your method.  If I have a face that has the top contour line and the center of the bit is following along that, won’t my face be over it by the width of the bit at the depth of the cut I choose? Thanks so much and hopefully I can figure this out.  Engrave is kinda junky 

[drd_808]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "If I have a face that has the top contour line and the center of the bit is following along that, won’t my face be over it by the width of the bit at the depth of the cut I choose" can you rephrase what you mean?

If you mean won't the bit be following along one side of line then no. It'll only touch the center of the tool to the center of the outline of the font for the text

I'd recommend using a 1/16 or 1/32 ball end mill for engraving and then setting your levels on tab 3, make the engraving surface your top height and bottom height using the "selection" option and then put a -0.005 offset in the bottom height. 

[sailhatin]

Sorry.  I’ll clarify.  So say I have a one inch square pocket.  If I want my corners square I would use the engrave feature as the bit would rise and hit those corner points.  If I follow the process you’re describing the bit would follow the contour of the one inch square I designed in cad.  If the bot was following the face, and the center of the bit followed the face, as soon as there’s any depth, the square would increase in width as the bit plunged in depth.  Am I seeing this the right way? So if the one inch square pocket was a quarter ofan inch deep, and if I were using a 45 degree v bit with a quarter inch shank, the hole would increase .125 on each side as I met full depth? Am I seeing this correctly? Thanks again for your time. 

[HughesTooling]

@sailhatin Best to just create a demo file and share as an f3d. You can use 2d contour for what you describe you'll need compensation on and the chamfer option should be enabled. But as you've pointed out Engrave will do a nicer job as it will pick out the sharp corners.

This is what 2d contour produces with the chamfer option and a taper cutter. The cutter contact point allowing for depth will follow the selected edge selected.

And this is engrave. I use Engrave all the time and have no problems so not sure why other people struggled with it. Might be worth sharing examples where it doesn't work. Only buggy thing I've seen is with multiple depths but I don't need that option very often, not sure if they've fixed that problem.