How can I select chamfer faces efficiently?

[mlitzkow]

(Skip this paragraph if you're in a hurry.)

I am working on a scalable design to make Gridfinity bases from plywood with a CNC Router. If you're unfamiliar with Gridfinity, it's a modular storage system that's popular in the 3D printing community. The system uses custom made bins that fit into a base with a standard grid spacing of 42mm. Gridfinity is frequently used for organizing things like toolbox drawers. The problem I'm trying to solve is finding an efficient way to make the bases for large toolbox drawers. Since consumer-grade 3D printers often have bed sizes around 220mm x 220mm, you can't print a base for a very large drawer at once. Instead you have to print multiple parts of the base you need and then mess around with glue or screws or whatever to put them all together. Also, each piece can take several hours to print, so the process to make just the base could take days. My idea is to use a CNC Router to cut the bases out of high-quality plywood. I would stil 3D print the bins.

I created a scalable design which patterns out the 42mm x 42mm "sockets" for the bins to fill a drawer of a given size (specified by parameters). For compatability reasons, the grid size is required to stay at 42mm, so I added some padding to take up any extra space around the eges of the drawer.

This scalablilty works well in the design space. I can just type my drawer size into my parameter list and the model "does the right thing". However, in the manufacturing space, I'm having some trouble. I find that the 3D Adaptive Clearing toolpath works great for all of the surfaces that are square, but there are 8 chamfered surfaces per 42mm grid. That adds up quickly into hundreds of chamfered surfaces for a reasonable toolbox drawer. Once the faces are selected, Fusion can deal with generating the toolpath just fine, but selecting hundreds of angled surfaces is unreasonable. What's worse, it doesn't scale. When I increase the size of an existing grid, the chamfered surfaces in the additional grid elements get missed. When I decrease the size of an existing grid, Fusion throws "missing reference" errors.

1. Can I somehow make this operation scalable - that is when I increase or decrease the size of the grid, I wouldn't have to rework the chamfer toolpath?

2. If the answer to question 1 is "no", then how can I select all those chamfered surfaces efficiently?

My Fusion file is attached.

[programming2C78B · Accepted solution]

Youre mindset is right but in the wrong area

1) you can make these without the chamfer and it'll still work, the pocket is just shallower
2) you baseplates do not need to be mechanically stuck together for the system to work
3)Simply program the chamfer for ONE grid (your first one) and then use RECTANGULAR PATTERN on that toolpath on 42mm spacing. You may even be able to drive the row and column count via your Formulas. 
You also should be able to select ONE chain for the contour toolpaths (top of the chamfer), not 8 faces on a model. 

[seth.madore · Accepted solution]

Exactly what @programming2C78B suggests:

[mlitzkow]

Good idea! This seems to be the "Fuson way" to do it. It's kind of like using 3D patterns instead of 2D patterns in the design space. In an ideal world, I woudn't have to care about the difference, but in the real world I do. Now I see that the same is going to be true in the Manufacturing space.

[mlitzkow]

I think @programming2C78B got the answer first, but the video you created really makes the process clear for those less familiar with patterns in the Manufacturing space. Many thanks to both of you.