Radius' pocket gadget or trick/workaround?

[Mark Bolton]

Anyone have a fast way (or perhaps its right in front of me) or know of a gadget/trick to quickly generate parametric pocketing toolpaths that would have the nice radiused ends as opposed to the square returns? I have several nice radius end toolpaths that drawn manually for repetitive operations that I scale for different work but scaling them on the width of course changes the tool stepover. Was just talking with another shop who drew up a formula in parametric that maintains the stepover. Be nice to be able to have that option in the pocketing toolpath?

[Rcnewcomb]

that would have the nice radiused ends as opposed to the square returns

Could you post a drawing or photo of what you are describing? The corners of an inside pocket will always have a radius that matches the round bit used to machine it.

There are several methods to adjust the vectors so the corners have a radius.

You can also add fillets to corners if that is what you mean.

[dealguy11]

I'm trying to understand how stepover is related to the radius on a pocket end.

It is possible to generate parametric geometry outside of VCarve Pro and import it using Paul Rowntree's "CSV to 2d" gadget. I do this for MDF door vectors using Excel. Does take a bit of work to understand the approach and setup, and you have to be good with Excel or whatever program you use to generate the points for the geometry, but it isn't really that difficult. It's best for things you intend to do a lot.

[Mark Bolton]

Im talking about when you setup a pocketing toolpath for surfacing material or surfacing your spoil board it is much more efficient (faster) to have radius/curved tool paths at the ends as opposed to VCarve generating a square toolpath. We have manually setup toolpaths for spoil board surfacing that use a half circle instead of an X/Y move from one pass to the next and looking into a way to generate these for various different size operations automatically while maintaining a pre-set stepover.

[Mark Bolton]

A way to automatically generate a toolpath like this (of course within a closed square vector) just like you would a pocketing toolpath but wind up with arcs at the ends instead of right angle vectors.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1krQWH ... vqEf6nR7qk

[Mark Bolton]

Thanks for the heads up on the CSV to 2D. I will give it a look. That may be the only available option. I probably didnt explain well what I was trying to do. The image link I posted hopefully makes sense. Its not a ton of work to edit those based on the stepover but it is a bit more work than simply drawing a box and selecting pocketing tool path. It would be nice if Vectric would add an option for the arc'd toolpath though in some circumstances I guess it would require a second offset profile pass depending on tool diameter and stepover.

Will do some reading on the CSV to 2D.

Thanks again.