How can I vary the depth of cut?

[philor@earthlink.net]

I want to create carved panels for doors. The design is fairly simple, several scrolls, curved lines actually. I can easily draw the design with the Part Wizard. My question is "How do I vary the depth of the cut, the z-axis."? This is the design element that will simulate hand carving.

[rgbrown@itexas.net]

Phil,

Bill Jarvis showed some work that simulated hand-carving at the mid-west Camp ShopBot. I think Bill used PartWizWeired for one of the files.

I have simulated hand-carving on the ShopBot with the keyboard written files, the "FC" program in ShopBot and with a combination of RHINO and VECTOR. All used the tool-bit profile as part of the carving design. I used two bits on several of the "carvings" for various effects.

"It can be done."

Ron

[rookie432]

Phil,

It sounds like you are trying to create a chisel carve or Vee carve. To my knowledge you will not be able to vary depth in Partwizard along a line or curve. You will notice that Partwizard allows you to do this with 10 fonts in your font file wich are highlighted in red. This is done with a very complex algorithm(spelling?). In order to do what you want to do you will need a more powerful program like Artcam Insignia. Ron has some magical abilities with Rhino and I believe him when he says "it can be done", It just might take some time and complex calculating.
The carving demos we showed at the camp may be something you are interested in. These may be available from Shopbot soon so keep your eyes peeled.

Good luck
Bill

[rgbrown@itexas.net]

Bill,

The doctor says some of my abilities could be cured with the proper medication. Yes, it is not a simple task to emulate hand carving work without either a sophisticated tooling program like ArtCam or a lot of time and thought.

What I liked about your demos was the SPEED your files showed. The ability to pick a design out of a book, call it up and have it cut in minutes was amazing -or was that amusing, I forget....

Of course the many hours you spent putting together the files was never seen.

Ron


Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock. - Will Rogers

[davidallen]

one way may be to draw the tool paths in a CAD program, export them as DXF, the use PartWizard to "machine along vectors"

[philor@earthlink.net]

After giving this some thought I realized that I could edit the .sbp file by changing the z-axis gradually from zero to a maximum depth and then back to zero again. This would take some time and some trial and error. I'm looking for an easier way.
Can this be accomplished with g-code commands?

[gerald_d]

While you are thinking of editting lots of values in the .sbp file, realise that spreadsheet programs like MS Excel can read and write .sbp files. The .sbp file is a CSV (Comma Separated Value) type file that can be manipulated as a spreadsheet.