To personalize each plaque, I’m going to engrave the Pack information, the year, and the boy’s name. In HeeksCNC, engraving is just a profile operation with the ‘tool on side’ parameter set for ‘on’. That isn’t to say that engraving is easy. It’s not. At least it’s not easy to get decent results. The complexity…
Tag: HeeksCNC
Arrow of Light – Profiling
The corners are just a simple curve and the profile operation is similarly simple. Since I don’t want the cutter to travel all the way around the plaque but rather just cut the corners, I have to move those arcs and line segments into a new sketch. Then I select the sketch and add a…
Arrow of Light – Pockets
This is the most time consuming operation in the project. Each of the pockets must be cleared to a depth of 3mm. The geometry defining the pockets is all in a single sketch and a single pocket operation has been added. Ideally, the cutter would move forward as it descends into the material, either in…
Steampunk Blowfish
Here’s my entry for the “open class” at my son’s pinewood derby. It turns out you only have to get your nose across the finish line to win.
Playing with the new and improved zigzag operation in HeeksCNC
Dan Heeks has recently rewritten the zigzag operation of HeeksCNC to use the opencamlib library instead of pycam. This is a huge improvement in speed. Just messing around, I designed this spider in blender and exported the .STL file. I went ahead and cut it on the router in blue styrofoam. Here’s the stl file…
HeeksCNC pocketing problem.
A user on the #cam IRC channel had a problem pocketing a shape in HeeksCNC. I’ve been stung by this myself. In the first picture below you can see the six identical pockets have not pocketed the same. The user had designed the oblong shape and copied and was confused why all the copies didn’t…
Website for my clock project
I’ve launched The Magic Clock (http://www.themagicclock.com) to show the build log for my Harry Potter clock. I built the site in Google Sites because it could be one of those sites that gets a lot of clicks for a short time and I’d rather not hammer my own server.
HeeksCNC sample files
I’ve been making some sample files for the basic operations in HeeksCNC. I’ll have one for profiling, pocketing, etc and I’ll upload the .heeks files to the wiki. Here’s a link. Maybe this will help newbies learn HeeksCNC a bit easier or maybe they’ll be useful for testing new features.
Pycam pockets
Playing with pycam in HeeksCNC to do pocketing. It works but is dog slow.
Cribbage board
This is a custom design I did as a gift. The “cap” of the “bottle” is a removable plug that conceals the pegs. I did the layout in qcad and sequenced all the drilling, engraving, and profiling operations in HeeksCAD.