Originally Posted by ger21  What you should be doing is offsetting your lines in your CAD program by the tool radius, which would allow you to get correctly sized parts. Your next option would be a good 2D CAM program, that'll do the offsets for you. Vectric's Cut2D and SheetCAM are two good ones, both under $200 |
^^- what he said! I've been doing it this way for years now. Just do a "contour" / offset line around the line where you want to cut. I have BobCad but never bothered learning how to fully use it; I still draw my parts in the free "emachineshop.com" software then just use BobCad to generate the G-code from the lines I drew. Draw the part, then "contour" say .125" for the toolpath, then just export only that toolpath as a DXF and convert it to G-code. I'll usually throw in another .01" contour outside as a rough pass, then use the .125" as a finish pass. I do some pretty complex parts that way. I always go over the G-code by hand to clean it up and optimize it, so that's where I adjust my depths as well..