Hey everyone! Following the all too familiar plan of ‘This should be an easy project’ that then slowly (or quickly) turns into ‘why won’t this stupid &^@#(&$)# stuff do the the bloody thing!’, I’ve ran into some silly problems with vectric. Specifically with the box creator. I’m trying to build a box that is bigger than the material I have on hand, so the generated layout that box creator gives needs to be reorganized and split across two separate pieces of material and that is where the problem is. Trying to move the vectors and change the tool paths gives me results that don’t match what was generated. Despite copying all the settings, the preview doesn’t show the little corner dog holes (not sure of the correct term) for fit tightness, and things look a little weird in the preview that make me concerned there’s something important that I’m missing. For those of you who have played with this, is there an easy way to reorientate or shuffle the existing tool paths? Or is there a way to regenerate the tool paths accurately things are laid out? Thanks!
To make sure you didn’t miss any settings you can duplicate toolpaths, right click menu, and then just change the vectors that are in them.
I have VCarve Desktop so I don’t have Gadgets but I see online that it makes 4 sides a top and a bottom. When you select a toolpath the vectors it uses are selected so if the sides were a problem, I’d find the toolpath(s) that affect the sides and make 3 copies. Then you can remove 3 sides in each toolpath and end up with 4 sets of toolpaths, one for each side. You should be able to move and rotate vector(s) that define a shape without affecting the result.
If an individual part is too big I would glue up a panel and then cut that.
I think the holes are called dogbones because a rectangle with 4 of them looks like a dogbone. Make sure your bit isn’t too big to fit into the ‘entrance’ of the hole. If it’s too big Vectric will skip it on a profile carve. It should be easy to tell if it’s being skipped in the 2D preview of the toolpath, shown when toopath checkbox is checked.
I ended up loading vectric on to my desktop computer so I could put the 2 instances side by side rather than trying to alt tab back and forth on a tiny laptop screen for copying settings. As soon as I did that all the dog holes were immediately apparent, not sure why they weren’t rendering on the laptop, I had even bumped up the render resolution because I thought that might have been the problem. Ended up getting them cut, it was an afternoon of frustration and colourful language, some of it my fault, some of it less so, but lots of lessons were learned lol. I did end up playing around with copying the tool pathing and changing the vectors associated with each, would certainly be another way of doing it. Doing a glue up wasn’t an option in this case, buying a full size sheet of plywood and breaking it down would have been an option and what I will be doing in the future, but didn’t think I would run into so many hiccups with moving the generated pieces around. The quarter sheets are convenient and slap right down on the machine which is why I was lured towards them. Lots of fun and games to be had with these machines and software!