Vectric Customer

I recently watched a Tips and Tricks video that demonstrated the 2 Rail Sweep technique for frames and this set off a light bulb for me to create some shallow dishes I have been thinking of but have not gotten to yet. When looking in VCP 9.5 to try this feature I discovered this was an Aspire feature. My question is: "can this be done also with VCP 9.5 in some other way or is this something I requires Aspire"?

Thanks all in advance.

Steve

You might try the Moulding Toolpath....

Also you can use the fluting toolpath with closely spaced vectors. See some of my previous posts. Click on my handle and search my posts for "fluting".

I have not yet done any work with the moulding functions so I will need to work on that one. I'm not sure of the Fluting will achieve the effect Ii am looking for since most of the pieces of the material I have to work with are round and oval. I have used the various modes of domes/dishes to work on the round pieces but find the slope of the walls are quite shallow and don't really provide the overall depth I am looking to achieve. Basically I am trying to do what really should be done by turning on a lathe but that is not a tool I have at this point.

It will definitely work with the fluting toolpath, it's just more work to setup than the moulding toolpath but it was the only option before the moulding toolpath was introduced which is why you will find a lot of examples of how to do it that way on the forum.

So I did some work with the Fluting toolpath with somewhat surprising results. I used log segment from a Locust tree we cut down last year. It was a small 6.6 x 6.5 x 1.75 piece but the bit depth is limited so I don't think I would want to go much deeper. I set the segment area to 5.75" and created 60 segments to ensure I had a significant amount of crossover in the passes. As well, I stepped the bit up to a .5" ball nose on a .5" shaft as I wanted to ensure the stability of the bit. This also provided a slightly larger flat on the bit because of it's manufacturing design. I'm not sure why but my .5" ball nose bits on .25" shafts are more round and have a smaller flat (if any). The whole process took about 40 minutes to run but I think it turned out fair. The cross over lines were pretty easy to eliminate with an 80 grit sponge and then finished with a 180 and 220. It was sealed with a butcher block sealer as I think it will be used as a nut dish.

The next step will be to see if I can get similar results using various shapes and profiles with fluting.

Very nice!!!

Here's it is using Moulding Toolpath....

Moulding looks like it will add some interesting variation to the process. I stared watching the tutorials last night and will try to use it this week in a trial.

Adrian is correct!
It USED to be the ONLY way to do stuff, but STILL a Very a powerful tool! scott

So one thing I have discovered is that closed profiles always apply the moulding to the outside of the profile. How do you get it to apply the profile shape to the inside? I have created a few paths which use a small center radius as the rail but this pretty much limits me to round or square shapes if I want them to develop onto a bowl or other similar shape, such as the image below.

Steve

You can create a lot of shapes using the Moulding Toolpath. You just have to get creative.
And Michael shows us all what you can do if you're really talented... http://forum.vectric.com/viewtopic.php? ... 1&start=15

Thanks for the link to that threat John. It sure did shed some light onto some additional techniques. It had not dawned on me to split a profile to allow use of the moulding tool path to the "inside". My head was stuck in the complete profile itself. Time to generate some chips and see what I can do with this.

Steve