Hi!
I wanted to use madCAM to generate drag knife toolpaths, but it does not have a DragKnife tool option. Do anyone know the best way to do that, can I create a new tool? I’m currently using a flat end mill and custom parameters on the madCAM free trial, but it is not ideal. I use rhino 8, does anyone have recommendations? I heard about RhinoCam and I just learned that KaroroCAM may have a drag knife tool added soon, but I never worked with either. I tried VCarve pro free trial, but I would rather have a tool within Rhino.
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Hi Rapheal,
Drag Knife toolpaths in KaroroCAM are moving ahead:
I have a question for you - do you need the Arc entry as shown on your picture above? If so does it need to be to the inside on “inside cuts” and the outside on “outside cuts”.
Cheers
DK
If I understand your question correctly, yes, the arc allows the knife to turn with a bearing. But, I assume that if you want an inside cut, you want the inside of your profile to stay intact, so you would have to apply to cut on the outside, but as long as it stays consistent. Also, for some of the edges, you could use the technique showed on the following picture, to maximize the cut length on your profil:
Thanks Raphael,
I’ve actually just about finished adding a radius lead-in to the drag knife code:
I made the call to give the inside and outside curves there own layer/input paths as that is the most robust rather than trying to “guess” in the code.
I’m also doing the entry on the mid position of the longest curve/line in the path as this seems as good as any place to start the cut.
I’ll have a think about how to add the outside rotation option for convex polygons.
I do find that path is a little wasteful for tight nesting etc.
Cheers
DK
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RhinoCAM does have a knife toolpath. I’ve never used it so I can’t answer any questions about it. Just pointing out that it does exist.
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@Raphael_ML the latest version of KaroroCAM has just gone live on the package manager:
If you would like to test the Drag Knife code I can supply you a trial license to allow G-code export - just send me a PM.
Cheers
DK
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I think this is relevent for this post.
In the left, you can see the madcam toolpath and the line on the right are from Karoro. For Karoro, you can see 3 line, first to enter and the third to exit. The second one represent (according to the preview) a place where the knife is taken out of the material and put back in right away. I cant think of a reason why we would want to exit and re enter. I think it will only give the knife a chance to change it orientation.
