Automated Dog Bone for CNC?
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Hey all, I am working on making a CNC milled shed using Sketchup. You can check out the project here:
http://sketchthis.net/the-wikihouse-project/
I am at the point where the model is just about ready for CNC milling, and I am struggling to find a way to efficiently add clearances for parts and add the dog bones for milling. This probably doesn't make a lot of sense, so I did a quick screen recording to explain it:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/bgk8d9zpdhh6xxe/Wikished%20slots.mov
All of the tools are there to do it, I just have to go through each and every rectangle manually, there's got to be a way to speed this up.
I've tried Milling Tools, which works if you're starting from a flat, non 3D object, but it kinda wrecks a 3D shape and causes just as much clicking and work.
I almost need something that does the opposite of what "Round Corners" does. (I did try to give Round Corners a negative value and it didn't work)
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Never tried it, but you can have a look at Thomthoms milling tool...
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Yeah, I've tried it, works well for 2D objects that you're pulling up into 3D, but all my "holes" are already 3D. Using that tool not only wrecks the 3D model, but makes more clicking then just starting over from scratch.
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If the holes are all the same, you could use a outline Component, place it, explode it, then push it through.
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There is a lot of repetition in this model, they aren't all the same, there are about 3 different varieties of holes so this sounds promising. Is outline component a plugin?
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Not a plugin, I only meant the Component would be made of just edges - an "outline" of the shape you need to cut out. Sorry.
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That's not a bad idea actually... I might have to try that. Not as automatic as I would have liked, but I think it will work.
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Eric, if you make the dog bone hole components so the insertion point is at some logical location, you should be able to just drop the components into place using intersecting guide lines or guide points to locate them. Open the panel components for editing, drop in the hole components as needed, explode them and use Push/Pull to push through the holes. You might also look at setting gluing attribute to the hole components although I find it difficult to drop glued components to guideline intersections with the correct orientation.
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I was thinking the exact same thing. Using the guide lines would be great because I could just mass delete them after I am done editing the model. This should work pretty darn well!
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Alright, I tried that, and it didn't work as well as I would have liked. When I explode the component, often times the vectors aren't registered on the face where I exploded then. A lot of times I need to "cut" them and "paste in place" them to get them to divide up the face for a push pull.
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So, it would be a matter of applying the dog bone fillets to geometry that already got thickness?
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Ahh.. yes - watching the video confirms my question.
Yes, that's and awful lot of fiddly work. Time for automation! My Dog Bone tool plugin should be possible to adjust for this.I would think the easiest way to use this would be to be able to select groups and components and then process that selection to widen and make dog bone fillets of all the holes found.
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That would be AMAZING if it did that. A plugin that did that would have a lot of use outside of just what I am doing here, for just about any CNC'd part out of wood that needs clearance this plugin would be useful. You tell me how many cases of cookies you want and your address
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@ericschimel said:
You tell me how many cases of cookies you want and your address
I'll find you at BaseCamp
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Does anyone have a sample model to share that would be useful to testing development?
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http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=phlatboyz%26amp;sm=1
http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-install-Phlatboyz-plugin-to-Google-Sketchup/
http://sketchuppluginreviews.com/2010/04/30/phlatscript-google-sketchup-plugin-review/
http://www.phlatforum.com/xenforo/resources/sketchucam.1/I keep a copy of skp v8 to use to make gcode it works better and I make the models in 13And retro save to 8.
I use phlatboyz to out gcode and the plugin has a dog bone tool in it
just think wood not foam
and you are off to the races -
Eric et al: Why are you modelling the dog-bone fillets? Doesn't the CNC software takes care of this? I don't know why I didn't raise this question earlier, but I recall at school when we used the CNC machine we set up the tool paths for the machine to follow - but never modelled the end resulting dog-bone fillets.
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