Hello all… I have recently been asked by a local contractor if I can match and remake a drawer front. The original drawer front has a profile around it that is hard to match. The contractor told me that they don’t make the router bit needed to match the original. Wondering if this is possible to put the edge on the piece with my cnc? I’m thinking I can use one of my tapered ball nose bits to put the profile on, but the design part has me a little stumped. Especially since I’m using VCarvePro… wondering if I need something like Aspire to make this happen… Any ideas or advice for me?
As far as Vectric software goes, you can check your moulding profiles in your clip art section. The software comes with some of them and you might be able to get that to work. If none of those match, I think you’d need Aspire to design the profile.
I’m sure there are other programs out there that could do. I believe Fusion 360 and SketchUp can extrude profiles and then you’d probably have to import the whole drawer front as an STL? Maybe someone with more knowledge on this will chime in.
On second look, I think you will be able to use the moulding toolpath to do what you need to do. You’ll just have to design your own 2D rail profile that matches the drawer in question. You’ll use the rail in the moulding toolpath to drive around the drawer shape profile.
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I hadn’t used the modeling toolpath yet. It took me about 5 minutes to figure it out and make this. Uses a ball nose bit like you suggested.
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I would gladly draw l draw this up in CAD for you. I use Fusion so I’d need to send you an STL or STP file or something. You’d have to make a precise drawing of what you need for me to model from, but otherwise it’d be fairly straightforward.
Thank you guys for the replies, I have only been in the CNC world for about 8 months now. I have a fairly decent grasp on most things, but have never played around with the moulding profiles. I’m not even sure where to start. I’d like to dig into this a bit and see if I can figure out how it all works. If Vectric is capable of doing this, I want to know how to do it… I will keep this topic updated with how it all works out.
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Ok, I’ve been playing with this for a bit and I have things figured out. So I drew up what I want the profile to look like, but I don’t think Vectric is recognizing this as a moulding profile? After I draw the open shape, is there something else I need to do?
Scratch that… my profile had some intersection issues… should’ve checked that before I threw the question on here.
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Could you just take a picture of the profile and convert it to black and white? You could turn it from a jpg to a svg. I don’t know about V crave but with Fusion you could import it, scale it to size and then do an extrusion.
That being said if there’s more than one or two to make I think it would be cheaper to just have a custom bit made. I haven’t used them but I do know people who have had them made.
Similarly, trace it with a pen and measure points like a contour gauge (or buy a contour gauge and measure the pins) then use the dimensions to create a CAD drawing. Fiddly I admit.