Cutting Corbels? More questions =)

[dray]

Hiya. This group has been an incredible source of information. I am currently doing a cabinet job with heavy heavy acanthus corbels and ornate details throughout the house.

My main concern is the corbels. First how do I cut them on a soft radius? Can I cut the radius big then Vcarve the acanthus then mill the rest off?
Or Just 3d mill them or?

I know Ill have to mill 3 sides but has anyone in the group sone this?

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And how about large pieces? Are these feasible with my machine? Its mostly getting bits that will cut deep enough?

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[myxpykalix]

Danny,
Your angel head looks like it would need to be "undercut" (behind the head) and I have no experience with this program but I think you probably would need Cut3d to do that with. Seems to me you would have to be able to register the material very precisely on the table or do it on an indexer (I have an indexer) you might post your question over in the vectric forum with your pics they could tell you exactly how to do this. Do you have the dxf's to these pics?

[handh]

Danny to do the Angel head, I think it would only be possible with a 5 axis machine.

[dray]

I cut the angel head this morning out of 2 pieces of laminated 1" mdf (I scaled it waaaay down" there werent any real undercuts.

Ill post pics later

[scottcox]

Danny,

It looks like you've tackled your 3 axis work in short time. You should consider an indexer. I have the 12 inch 25/1 ratio indexer and I've set my table up to accept a 16" diameter workpiece (length = 10ft x-axis).

With an indexer, the corbels would be a piece of cake, joining three flat files (each can still be 3d files) with indexer rotation commands. You would still have to work the head and tail of your workpiece manually or set up a jig for your bot to do it.

The angel may also carve well using Cut3D and an indexer. Cut3D carves 4 sides of a 3D model, then you can rotate the model 45 degrees and toolpath four sides again, giving you 8 vantage points over the model. You could rotate to 22.5, do it all over and get 16 vantage points, etc.

If you can keep from crashing your collet into the piece (longer bits?), you should come up with a very close proximity of your 3d model.