Tech Tuesday is a weekly blog that addresses some of the most common questions and concerns that I hear throughout the previous week from users of BobCAD’s CNC software. Both customers and future customers are more than welcome to leave a comment on what they would like to see covered for the following Tech Tuesday.
Today’s article trails off of last week’s Tech Tuesday. In the previous article, I drew a rectangle in CAD, added CAM plates and made a solid part model with the Boolean Add function. In this article, we are going to take that same part and apply a fillet & a center pocket. If you missed last week’s Tech Tuesday, click here to catch up!
To get started, click on the Fillet icon in your Create 2D tab. You will notice that we have 3 picking method options. For this example, I’m going to use the Single Corner click method. Before we select our corner, we want to update the radius to reflect ⅛ of an inch. Click the points we want to apply our Fillet to and we will see sharp corners become rounded.
When finished, hit Cancel. As you can see, we got our ⅛ inch Fillet applied to the part and we can move forward to the final step of adding a pocket to the center of our part.
Let’s create the geometry for the center pocket. Go into the Create 2D tab and select the rectangle function. The dimension for our rectangle will be 3 inches long and 2 inches wide. I will then change my corner type to radius (red arrow) at a quarter-inch value. This allows me to skip an additional step with the fillet command. Hit OK and cancel to save and move on.
Now we are ready to make a solid model. Let’s go ahead and put our solid model on a new layer. Go into the layer window, right-click and then select New layer. Let’s name it “Solid” & hit enter. The green check lets me know that layer is now active.
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Join your fellow machinists. Get the latest Tech Tuesday CAD-CAM articles sent to your inbox. Enter your email below:Now I’ll go and change the view on my document toolbar to the ISO2 view. This gives me a good perspective of the part when I’m using the 3D commands. Then I’ll go to my Create 3D tab & pick the Extrude Boss command.
As you can see, the system has the positive distance at 1 shown in the image above and I want it at 0. The default Other Direction value is 1 and that is what I want. However, I don’t want the center pocket to go all the way through so I will hit Shift & left-click on the center rectangular geometry to close the hole… hit OK & cancel to save your work.
As we conclude our final step, I am going to select the Extrude Cut function in the Create 3D tab and select our center pocket. It’s difficult to do with the shading on, so I am going to hit “S” on my keyboard to turn it off. Hit shift and left-click on your center rectangle geometry. Change the positive distance to 0 and change Other Direction to a .5 value. Hit OK and turn your shading back on to reveal the pocket we created in the center of our part.
That’s it for today’s Tech Tuesday. If you don’t own V31 and you want to try applying a fillet and center pocket to our part model, download our trial version HERE. Thank you for reading another Tech Tuesday; see you next week!
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