With the CAD drawings all converted to the cuttable area of the Book machine, I needed to confirm that all the parts were placed properly. I scratched my head about how to do this, and then hit upon an easy and straightforward way to do this.
I just moved on and created all the machining operations (MOPs), and generated the toolpaths for the boards. Since the cuts define where the tool will go, a quick visual check of all the cut lines (to confirm that they never “cross” each other) is sufficient to see whether the parts are all spaced properly.
I think that the .nc that came with the plans showed cutlines that are right on top of each other (ie the parts are set as 1/4″ apart). I had been trying to use more like an extra 16th (3/16″ spacing) instead. I ran just the part outlines on all 4 boards first, and only found one part that needed to be moved 1/8″ in the whole mess. Not bad.
Then I went through and selected the various cut types and put them into MOPs. I broke things down into “small drills” (places where the hole is 1/4″, to be cut by the endmill in one plunge), “large drills” (places where the endmill will need to bore out a larger hole for some reason, such as the 7/16″ holes for cross-dowels, or other “inside” profiles), “pockets” (where the area is not to be completely drilled through, for counterbores, or for the decorative logos), and “parts cut out” (for “outside” profiles). Of these, the parts cut out is the only one that must be run last, for obvious reasons, but other than that, one could theoretically run any of the other MOPs in random order (they are not dependent upon each other). However, I decided to run the MOPs in the order listed here, with the hope that by going (more or less) from “smaller” holes to “larger” ones, the machine would have an easier time cutting, and the toolpathing would have an easier time calculating.
There were a few parts that didn’t set up properly; most of the “keyhole” shapes didn’t work right. A small amount of tweaking (I did essentially the same thing as a “join all gaps” function, which I can’t remember the name of, in Cambam) fixed these, and again they were pretty easy to see by inspecting the toolpaths carefully. Oh, there were 2 or 3 holes that showed up as 0.249999″ instead of 0.25″ (the diameter of the endmill), so I had to round them up so that the toolpath generator would allow those cuts.
I spent quite a bit of time checking all the gaps between parts, and checking for bad-looking (or missing) toolpaths. I am fairly certain that I’ve found all the problem areas, and I now have 4 .nc files, ready to cut!
If all goes well, I should be able to start cutting in the next day or two, and perhaps even finish this weekend.