enroute for curved faces

[ninehigh]

I'm fairly new to enroute, but I'm looking to create a curved faces on a board.

I know that this may take different bits, but I'm curious to know if it's something that can be programmed easily in enroute4.

Up to now, I've been creating different layers and cutting any curves out as "steps" and then sanding down the edges to make it a smooth curved face.

The router that I'm using is a multicam 3000.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

[Butterknife]

Hi ninehigh,

I hope you are talking about doing 3D surfaces.

Are you using EnRoute Pro? If so, you have plenty of 3D tools. Play around with them to design your part. You can even import them from something like AutoCad and create a surface from a mesh.

Once you have your shape created, continue doing your step rough, then use a ballnose bit and try an island fill. For good work, make sure you do a fine overlap on your final pass - say 90% - 92% overlap.

There are a lot more tricks to it, but if you saw someone do it once, you'd have a lot better understanding.

Good luck,

Butterknife

[ninehigh]

Thanks for the info butterknife.
Do you know of any tutorials that teach these 3d surface techniques?
Also, do you know if there is anyway to directly transfer models from sketchup to enroute?
Thanks again.

[Butterknife]

EnRoute sells a great DVD with many very useful and informative turorials on it.

It's by a guy named Tom Penner and he's extremely good with the software. It costs $349, but if you have Pro and you're wanting to make the most of it, you should consider it.

The link is: EnRoute Software Makes Things Easy.

As far as importing goes, there are several ways to import a 3D file into Enroute, offhand I can't remember them all, but I know it accepts a STL DXF and DWG file.

I hope this info is helpful.

Butterknife