Learning to CNC

Today I learned how to use BobCAD to CNC this pine in 3-axis. I quickly whipped up a design in Rhino and then imported it into Bobcad. The settings you choose depend on several factors including material choice, material depth, complexity of design, quality of finish. Once you have finished set up, the program creates a file which is basically the map of coordinates that the CNC machine will follow to carve out your design. You put it on USB and plug it into the DSP controller and proceed to position the drill bit at 0, 0, 20mm so that is is just touching the corner of your 20mm thick pine square. Then you press start and away it goes. We start with a bigger drill bit to carve out the bulk of design. Then we run the program again with a finer drill bit for a cleaner finish. This process varies machine to machine.

Here we see a step depth of 0.2mm.

Here we see a step depth of 0.2mm.

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We used a 14mm diameter drill bit.

We used a 14mm diameter drill bit.