Want to enter round stock instead of square

[leroy13]

I want to have my material round instead of square. Can it be done and if so how?
Thanks,
John

[Ms Wolffie]

Round as a log or round as a plate?
Cheers
Wolffie

[tmerrill]

Hi John,

Cut3D only accepts a rectangular material block.

If you can give us a better idea of what you are trying to achieve, as well as other software you may have, I'm sure someone may have ideas to help you.

Tim

[metalworkz]

Hi John,
If you will be cutting from round stock what I have done to create a representative preview is to use a square large enough to fit your material and tool width within for the material size. You will need to create an outside profile for the wanted size and cut through the material thickness. The outside portion of the material can be deleted(doubleclick on it) then and will leave the wanted round shape. Of course you will want to do any other cutting operations to have the final item represented correctly for previewing. I work with metal round stock often and find it would be nice to create the material shape needed, but unfortunately the demand is not very high for this. I hope this helps you.

[leroy13]

Hi Guys,
Here is a stl file of what I am doing. All I need is to cut the inside. The outside is finished. I want to do the inside with a .25 ball nose. I draw in Rhino. If you would please take a look at my file and help I would appreciate it .

Thanks,
John

[metalworkz]

It looks like all you need to do is create the model for the inside contour and machine it concentric with the finished outside contour. If you need to get an accurate preview of the circular part I believe the way I mentioned above will work but it will only be round(cylindrical) and look correct for the top view. I don't think there is an easy way to get the side view of the part in the preview, but that is really not needed if all you need to do is cut the center out.
I had a somewhat similar model to cut when doing trumpet and trombone mouthpieces and you can do it several different ways as far as the toolpaths go. You could rough out the center if the shape at the size of the smaller end of the taper with a 2D pocket toolpath and then rough the 3D shape and finally the finish pass. Your part looks fairly deep so you will need a long ball nose to get to the full depth but you have already figured that. If you do not have the 2d cutting then it can be done with 3D toolpaths but it will probably take a bit longer unless you use a larger flat bit to hog out the bulk of material. I hope this helps and maybe someone that uses Cut3D more often will offer some more pertinent information for you.

[leroy13]

Hi Wes,
You made me think about the piece and how to do it. And yes, after your suggestion I redrew the file with my inside cut in a box exactly the same size as my original part only square not round. And of course setting the origin to the center.

Thanks again,
John