Thanks for all the help. It doesnt need to be tonight its 1:30 were I am so Im going to bed. But basically Im making a very specific type of custom drum and the hardware for it is very precise to achieve the proper tone. so I am building a thickness sander designed to sand the inside and outside of the drum at the same time to the exact thickness to fit the hardware and this is the template that the blank will ride in.
I have sketchup and thats about it though I know I can get autodesk for free. I also have photoshop cc as well illustrator. I have a decent amount of time working in 3d environments so thats not really a problem for me its more knowing were all the buttons are to make the program do what I need.
oh yeah i know what you mean lots of times I look at a project and wonder am i taking the long way around I wish i could be of more help to you I know youtube is a great resource if you happen to come across the video that you can apply to what your trying to learn
Is this what you mean in easel on how you cant get it to line up??
I might be misunderstanding but i dont see what the problem is with that easel file in the picture above It shows 2 lines because of the depth of your circles and the depth of cut per pass if you change the depth of cut the second line goes away and you only have 1 line so that means that everything is tracking in exactly the same place as all the rest of the circles thats what you wanted right to be able to have them all meet in the same place at the end there?
While I donāt know inkscape, and assuming you donāt want to use a CAD package (youād make parametric sizes and simply duplicate x times with a -1 for the parameter function. However this is pretty easy to do in Illustrator (and I would be surprised if inkscape canāt do it. Just draw a circle 24 and a circle 10, then blend with a the number of steps you need in between (12 in this case), then āexpandā then ungroup to turn them back to individual circles. Then align the left sides of the circles. Also you can set the stroke width to thicker as you requested.
Iāve only imported a few SVGās, none of which had tight tolerances, so I canāt speak as to whether something will transfer in properly. But you should be able to design the whole thing in an outside program and adjust the size of it all at once after import.
If you wanted to do this in Easel alone, hereās the process Iād suggest following:
- Draw the āoutsideā of each circle and position them as desired.
- Draw the āinsideā of the outermost circle, center it at the same coordinate point as the outermost circle, then combine. That should give you a pocket that runs all the way around. Adjust depth as desired, then send to back.
- Repeat step 2 with the second largest circle, send to back, and then bring forward until it appears in front of the outermost circle.
- Repeat step 3 with the rest of the circles.
You can easily align all the circles using the tools in Easel. If you wanted them lined up on the left, as in the drawing above, then use the center radio button to determine the location of the centers along the Y axis (say, 13.000"). Then use one of the two left radio buttons to determine the location of the edges along the X axis (say, 1.000"). You can then position everything by setting the Y centerline and the X boundary. If you have a notepad or small whiteboard beside you, you can write down the coordinates and then just copy what you wrote down instead of relying on memory.
@HenryFeldman has the right idea there. Use one of the flat sides of the circle bounding box, and the vertical center to snap it to the grid in your software. Then rotate the entire shape 45 degrees.
The problem with trying to draw it with the 45 degree pattern to start with is that you canāt align to grid. The distance from the bounding box corner to the circle will be slightly different for each size, and make precise alignment difficult.
Thanks everyone for all the input. I have decided to run a test and see which of these methods works the best so tonight I will prepare several different files and test them out tomorrow. The last question I have is that I have found that when milling circles on my machine the quality of the cut depends a lot on the direction the router moves in relation to the direction the endmill is spinning. Basically Iām trying to avoid climb milling, is there a way to control which way easel decides to make the circle because I noticed that when importing svgs it just seems to pick it abatrarily.