ChopSaw Virtual Tool beta in ShopBot Labs

[bill.young]

My New Years resolution is to do something with all the half-done projects that I've accumulated over the years, so I'm working on getting a handful of new things on ShopBot Labs for everyone to play with.

The first one is a "ChopSaw" program from a couple of years ago, to make it easy to make crosscuts and cut miters. As with all things in ShopBot Labs there's no guarantee that it will do what it's supposed to do (or do anything at all for that matter!), but try it out if you're interested and give me some feedback.

http://www.shopbottools.com/LabFiles/SBChopSaw.htm

Bill

[khaos]

Hey thanks Bill. One observation: When selecting multiple passes the depth is not incrimenting. Its the full cut for all passes.
I appreciate you putting the time into the community. Here and everywhere else that you do.

[bill.young]

Thanks for the feedback Joe.

The multiple passes depth seems to be working for me, so I'm wondering if it's confusion on the way the ChopSaw specifies the "cutting Height", referenced from the table surface, instead of the "cutting depth" which is usually referenced from the material surface.

Let's say you want to cut all the way through a .75" thick board in 3 passes...the material thickness would be ".75", the "cutting height" setting would be "0" (relative to the table surface), and the passes setting would be "3". Those settings give me a file that's cut in 3 passes of .25" each.

My logic behind zeroing off the tabletop and referencing the cut there is that you don't need to know the precise thickness of your material to make sure that you cut all the way through. As long as your safeZ setting is high enough, you can cut several pieces of varying thickness and be sure that they will all cut all the way through, without having to rezero or accurately measure their thickness.

I'm not sure that this is the best way to do it but it makes sense to me...if there's a groundswell of disagreement I'll look into changing it.

Of course it could just be broken and that's why the multiple passes isn't working for you...send me an email if the cutting height business is not the problem persists and I'll dig deeper.

Bill

[khaos]

AHA! My thought process was from one of zeroing at the surface of the material.

When I change Cut Height (from tabletop) back to 0 I see what I would expect. I can see a real value to z at the table for this type of work. Most of my thought process has been around 3d work with little on cutout until this last week I made a kitchen for my brother. Counter, cabinates etc. And I cut stairs for my workshop and used the bot as a miter (because I could). Which I what got me interested in the chopsaw project.

(ps. we need to handle the error where SB3 is not installed
. Currently it terminates. :o )

[dana_swift]

Very similar to my ShopBotSawyer program. I didn't bother putting in the angles, but have considered supporting other angle options, such as bevels in the X/Z axis. Using multiple passes, each one offset from the previous, would leave a nice bevel in addition to the miter. If anybody would like that, I may mod my program and re-post it.

FYI I will have that (and other goodies) in Florida at Gary's camp if you would like to try it out.

D

[myxpykalix]

I have been following this thread and when you talk about bevels, rather than making multiple passes why couldn't you use a V bit for your bevel? I know you are limited to that angle, but unless you need a 36 degree angle couldn't you just use the same toolpath with the vbit for the bevel?

[dana_swift]

Jack the Vbit would be a better choice for beveling, but I would approximate it even with a ball nose. Using an end mill (like I usually do) creates a stair step approximation to the bevel with the steps determined by the incremental depth per pass.

The ball nose would leave a fairly good "scalloped" approximation to the bevel slope, but is much better than the end mill. The biggest problem is the ball digging into the spoil-board at the bottom of the cut.

A light sanding is all that was needed when I made bevels using an end mill, however the incremental depth I used was about 0.050. Then it looked great!

D

[wberminio]

Dana

I have project in which my side panels are angled at
88.5 degrees(44.25 degrees each end).The bevel feature would be a great help.

Erminio