I am attempting to cut a a keyboard case with the plate built in. To do this i had essentially a rectangle set to mill the top cavity down 8mm and then had the layout being cut out from that. when i went to simulate i noticed that the pass would mill out the inside pocket as expected, but had then started the inner plate hole cut outs from the top of the stock. Is there any way to have it start from the 8mm depth for those? it would cut the time in half.
I don’t think you can do this in Easel, but you can in V Carve and Aspire…
In V Carve/Aspire, you can set the start depth and even change the starting points of each individual path.
There’s only one possible order for nesting a deeper pocket inside of a larger shallow pocket in Easel. Is it trying to cut all the way from the top (air cutting), or is it retracting to the top, and plunging back down… the first shouldn’t be happening, but the second is proper behavior.
if it’s the first you might want to share the project, or a sample that shows the problem, so that inventables staff can take a look. I tried to recreate it myself, but I can only get the second behavior.
It seems to be air cutting. I am not sure if that is because i am not doing a fill cut, but am cutting an outline? Either way here is a link to the test project that seems to illustrate it air cutting.
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Not sure if it works for your project, but if you switch the inside cutout to fill at 0 depth, you can then hold shift and click both shapes, right click and “Combine”. Then the initial fill cut won’t waste it’s time in the area to be cut out.
I think this could be modified as a workaround for your project - change the 8mm cavity to only carve out the areas where there aren’t additional carvings to be done. That should speed up the initial cavity cut and reduce overall time.
Here’s an example: Easel - Copy of Air Cutting Issue.
Certainly a trick to remember. Unfortunately my 1.5 mm bit only has about 8mm of depth for cutting. It isn’t a deal breaker at a hobby level, but i wanted to make sure there wasn’t something simple to be done to have it recognize that material had been removed in the roughing pass.
tagging @Zach_Kaplan
definitely buggy behavior… at a guess because outline mode isn’t combining like fill modes do
I think it could be worked around by separating the two cuts to separate sheets… on the second sheet subtract out the first cuts depth, and before running it change the saftey height (on machine >advanced) to add the depth of the first cut (so that the retraction is above the original work surface), and zero the z height to the height of the first cut… PITA but it should work
Are you saying that it is air cutting (dark blue lines connected to the red line) the on path even though it has already removed that material with the pocket?
If so please submit this in the help menu so they can associate the file with the error. I think it might be a tool path inefficiency that our engineering team needs to review.
Where is that help submit? I am looking in the help portion of the project, but only see links to the forum, guides, and troubleshooting.
Hi Zach,
It is under troubleshooting. Click “Get help from Inventables.”
@ZachPhillips
We were able to recreate the issue. It’s almost as if Easel generated extra paths, but I found that it didn’t affect the carving outcome. The devs will be working on this. Thank you for your patience!
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