how to do crosshatching in Estlcam?

Mostly Printed CNC - MPCNC Advice
#1

I’ve seen a guy on youtube etching plexiglass to make LED glowing signs. He used a crosshatch pattern in the text and I was trying to figure out a way to get something into Estlcam that would work.
I’ve tried making text in inkscape using a crosshatch fill, but Estlcam doesn’t support that type of fill.
I suppose I could manually draw lines, but that seems very labor intensive.

Does anyone know a good way get these crosshatch lines into Estlcam?
Or should I try something other than Estlcam for this?

See attached youtube capture and this is the vid link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnXvK8qUEU8

Thanks.

zotsyCapture.png
zotsyCapture.png1010×410 320 KB

#2

An easy way to do something like that is to use the pocket with the “linear” pocketing strategy. If you don’t want it to be exactly horizontal, you can rotate the sketch, then do the pocketing, then rotate it back.

This won’t be perfect, because it’s designed for pocketing, but I think it would be close. You’d have to look closely at the finishing pass stuff to try to remove or reduce the outside line.

Otherwise, I can think of some pretty quick (less than an hour) way to do it by drawing some lines (draw one, then add the rest in a linear pattern) in something like librecad, then trimming the lines by the text outlines. It might take an hour to figure out exactly which buttons to click though :slight_smile: . Even when you have that though, you’ve got a ton more clicking in estlcam to engrave all of them. I don’t know enough about other CAM software to advise about those.

#3

Looking at that video, it looks like a pocket operation to me.

#4

I think carve would do the same thing as well. The width between lines would be the stepover distance, that looks like maybe 20%.

I like the way he positioned it at the beginning, now I have to get a smaller square…bummer, I have to go to the hardware store again…ugggghhhh.

#5

I searched the youtube comments and found this.
My first try in Estlcam to do this didnt look that good. I’ll try some more.

tvannaman20007 months ago
How did you set this up in Vcarve? I’m interested in the line patterns you have within the letters and around the controller. Are you using a texture or did you just manually put the vectors in there to follow?
Reply 1
PollyMotion
PollyMotion7 months ago
+tvannaman2000 Hi! I didn’t use any special engraving technique. If I remember correctly, I used a simple pocket toolpath, just giving it an angle, and 0.2mm cut depth.
Reply
tvannaman2000
tvannaman20007 months ago
Did you use some kind of large step over to get the parallel lines within the text?