I’ve cut some parts. I’ve made some signs. I even made a bottle opener with nested islands. Now I want to do a simple bowl with a slight raised honeycomb pattern in the bottom.
I’ve made a rectangle with very rounded corners in Inkscape, and have seperate honeycomb pattern as the background. Importing those into EstlCAM, I thought I could make a part on the outside of the bowl, and an island on the inside. => Nope, because EstlCAM thought the honeycomb pattern on the outside was part of the bowl (I had a hope it could distinguish the two objects). Then I erased the honeycomb pattern touching the outside. Now I could make a part of the outside, and island on the inside of the stroke - Success!.
But when I try to make a hole on the inside of the raised honeycomb pattern, it also makes a hole in the bowl-part.
Am I going about this in the wrong way?
Removing the part of the honeycomb behind the bowl edges, I cant select the inner part of the bowl shape in estlcam…
I’m no good with Inkscape myself, but for EstlCAM…
The profile for the bowl shape, inner and outer must be complete. Like you separated the profile out on the outside, you will have to do so for the inside as well. This might work if you designate the outside as a different colour, and it will close the profile rather than just merge it into the honeycomb pattern. A gap is undesirable, as it will make things weird when trying to get the honeycomb pattern into the bottom.
Alternately, you might be able to do it by manually selecting the toolpaths, but I’ve had only really limited success with manually selecting curved toolpaths
The part that you can select now is what you’ll want for the final pockets.
It’s a good idea with different colors - I’ll have to try that.
I begrudgingly got around it by manually selecting path (rightclick is a godsend - auto selects all on the green line). Whether or not it’ll end up pretty is another question.
But is this the correct workflow? Or is it better to work with layers in EstlCAM, so it’s possible to easier autoselect objects
When things get complicated, the solution is to either do the complicated things in CAD (which is what I would call inkscape in this workflow) or use the manual tool (and right click with the green line is the best).
It may seem like a waste of time, but 1 min of clicking to save 5 minutes of learning a new skill in inkscape is a win, as long as you aren’t doing it 6+ times.
A similar issue is when I have a feature that goes off the edge of a shape. Like if I were cutting a doorway in a wall or something. Estlcam just sees the shape of the door, and doesn’t understand that I don’t care about outside the shape. I will just click through manually, and it doesn’t take long.
