I thought I had a pretty simple carve. It’s a segment of a simple circular window stop. There are three parts to the carve - a pocket clearing at height one, a pocket clearing at height 2, and then a cut along the outside path to cut the outline of the piece.
The preview (and also the simulation) show individual drill down holes instead instead of a pocket clearing. It does improve if I set the project to an 1/8" end mill, but I need bits with a slightly longer cut length for this project, and the bits I have are 1/4". There’s no reason it shouldn’t work with 1/4".
I am at a loss. Any suggestions?
When I see things like this, it’s usually because Easel is being very literal with the vector dimensions and thinks the bit won’t fit due to inaccuracies in floating point math. The best solution is to layer your image so there’s overlap between each layer, and slightly oversize your design (literally by like, .002" or so until it works as intended).
In this case, I would have a solid dark-gray (lowest) layer, then a layer of light gray, then a layer at 0". The lowest layer would be the full-width of the piece (same as the outside cut). Then the light gray layer would be wider than it needs to be by some small amount so it’s overlapped by the top layer. The final white layer would be the exact width you want to leave uncut.
A second option, though harder to design for, is to switch to using lines and cutting on the line (so you’d be telling Easel exactly where to place the bit, rather than what you want removed). Or, if your design is a complete circle, you could make this using stacked circles with Cut Inside Shape selected for the same effect.
Hopefully that makes some sense.
I would first try to play with the order of the layers. make sure the cut out is the bottom layer and the other two carving out layers are on top. Easel doesn’t really show you the order of the layers, so you just have to select it and then push the buttons a couple times to move the layer forward/backward and see if anything changes.
Another thing to do is to duplicate the whole workspace twice and then delete things so that there is one operation on each of the three workspaces, so there is zero interference because they are all 100% separate. I do the duplicate workspace instead of cut/paste to make sure everything is exactly lined up, as long as you don’t change anything after you duplicate. This way also allows you to use an infinite number of different bits on the same piece instead of just the 2 (rough/detail) allowed on one workspace.
I know very little of Easel, so these could just be janky work arounds, but they’ve worked great for me.
