I’m learning to use Fusion360 right now and I thought a great first project would be to model the Z touch plate. I’ll be routing it tomorrow, but I wanted to share it. Since I’m learning the software, I thought one of you brilliant CAD-minded individuals would take a critical eye to it to make sure it’s feasable as designed. I’m not even sure what I should have in mind while designing, so this is learn by doing for me. At this stage, I’m just playing with geometry. Let me know what you think!
Looks great. I made a similar plate in Sketchup. Since I’m not too handy with drawing/CAD programs yet I kept it simple. I drew a 4" rectangle, added a couple of lines to make an inset L and a circle at their intersection. I exported it as a DXF file. I imported that to Estlcam and created the toolpaths making a deeper 1/8" groove between the two L lines to 8 mm. I just pocketed out the L shape to 5 mm depth making sure to manually draw the pocket box Past the lines at the edges of the plate so it would be square as Christian suggests on Youtube. I drilled the circle to 8mm depth. I put aluminum tape on the X and Y, as well as a patch near their intersection. They all touch. I screwed a 1/2" woodscrew to the far end of the top of the X axis and alligator clipped my Probe wire to that.The other alligator clip bites a small magnet to stick to the router bit. I used calipers to figure out the XY offset. Since I didn’t drill the intersection hole all the way through I measured the plate + tape thickness and figured out the offset with Estlcam.
Figuring X Y and Z and X deviation takes about 10 seconds with Estlcam’s Auto feature.
Since it’s so east to draw in 2D and use Estlcam to figure out the rest, it suits my needs for now. I’d attach the DXF but the forum filter didn’t like it…