Cool testing!
Doesn’t the finger joints make it harder to weld and clean up the corners rather than just having straight edges?
Advice from master welder @heath Heath Satow tells me to do what you say. The main reason is that with laser welding with metal feeding through wire the velocity is controlled by the machine and not the “human” so the weld is very clean and good. Also for a beginner like me. I didn’t test it yet.
At the moment I test and I try to learn from mistakes, lack of equipment … My first welding on the complex 24 faces torus was not very clever nor good. But my second test on the cube without wire and some finger joint was not too bad. Cube geometry and laser precision allow to have very little gaps between sheets. Cubes is also an easy geometry to maintain during welding. So with wobbling (laser lateral movement) the edge is melting quite well, but It requires a good velocity. So piece has to be maintained well, hands/arms must have some support to move with good velocity. Helmet must allows to see clearly (I bought a cheap one from Xtool/xlaserlab that was not well set on my first tests).
So now I have that on cube, I don’t need a strong weld but a nice rounded edge after grinding.
The little wave is due to fast movement and the wobbling, no use but just a test.
Also I like quite a lot the coded finger joint it is a way to have labels without labels. It is not very useful for the shapes I made but I plan to have patterns in the faces, so order will become mandatory. Perhaps I could make little zones with this coded finders and leave main portions without so I will weld them with wire feeding.
Holding the sheets is also difficult. So I tried to make some support.
I developped a tool to make support better than what is existing, thickness of support is taken into account, not like in others tools like Bowerbird for example. Something near is that. I cut the sheets from the plywood boxes from my laser. It is not good plywood (fume and flame) but not expensive !
Big thanks again, @laurent_delrieu.
You’re right to say the finger joints aren’t ‘perfect’ yet, however looking at your test(s) I thought I had something simple enough to get something similar to you but this isn’t the case.
You seem to be applying it a ‘complex polygon’ without issues in your post above.
This is my shape (closed mesh):
Even though I change the “nB”, nothing happens along shared edges other than what you see here:
Are you able to take a look? I’d truly appreciate it. UNITS ARE IN METERS.
test02.gh (59.9 KB)
Hello
I don’t see where are the problems. This seems to work !
I have no pc for 2 days. So here are some important things.
The tool needs closed polyline as input. They must be CCW like in rhinopolyhedron. Make finger joint version 2 can handle badly oriented polyline.
Now it is better to have thickness of finger tl to 0.
But if you want to see 3d you must extrude curves with the z from planes and also use the thickness you used. Then cap the result.
I ll surely add a mesh version in next release.
Sorry, I know I said I have a mesh - but I am using the face boundaries (polylines) 
CCW?
Do you mean the order of polyline segments or the position of each polyline?
I ll look at your script tomorrow afternnon
Hello
At first I didn’t understand why it was not working but you provided this kind of geometry.
My tool works with planar closed polygons that have some common edges. Here there are no common edges.
After that I remade your geometry, but it shows some flaws in my tool, with very sharp angle, some almost flat ones. Also there are some union problems with side.
But whatever, here is a quasi working solution.
With intersection on a sharp parts, so at the end this geometry is a good way for me to test my tools and update them to tackle all the problems.
test02 coded finger joint LD.gh (16.2 KB)
I am so sorry @laurent_delrieu — that must have been a previous bake.
Here’s the raw polygon:
basepolygon.gh (3.4 KB)
I still tried your plugin with the correct base polygon, with no success.
Also, here’s my no-plugin humble approach (basic version, tab/router bit cleanup not included):
face-tabs_basic.gh (27.3 KB)
Note:
This version skips corner tabs for simplicity’s sake.
If you have a solution that works, it is the principal. What I wonder if ngon, compas are usable to to this kind of geometry. They are very good for CNC things. I didn’t find a way to do what I wanted, tools that works for Laser cutter.
Sorry for that, I don’t like tools that doesn’t work so I will certainly remove it from official Nautilus.
Here the best I could do for the moment
face-tabs_LD with good geometry.gh (14.4 KB)
I understand.
I consider my approach a work-in-progress because it doesn’t solve all problems. So, it’s more of a workaround than it is a solution.
Metal is forgiving, especially if it’s thin. A couple of years in the past I used an earlier version of my script to laser cut + laser weld a closed brep with ngons:
The perforations make it hard to see but the tabs were good enough for the case.
No problem at all. I like the plug-in. I will try what you have now.
