Fusion 360 CAM - Trace and Engrave

[Music] hey everyone kevin from mechanicaladvantage.com i've gotten a few recent phone calls about this subject it's always been sort of a question that's asked about in training classes and i've seen it asked about on forms and misunderstood a lot and the reason that this topic is going to be misunderstood is is we're going to talk about engraving text so i want to take some kind of a tool on the machine and i want to cut text into my part and usually what we refer to that as is engraving text so let's switch from the design workspace over to the manufacturer workspace really quick and we can check out that i have a setup created i've already added a tool that i want to use into this so you don't have to watch me pick it from a library and we're going to go through and talk about a couple tool paths if i hit the drop down if we look through the list the reason we get a lot of misunderstanding is we say we want to engrave text and here we have the engrave command but the majority of the time that you want to put text on the part is you most likely want to use the trace command which isn't quite as intuitive of thinking that you want to engrave it so let's hop back over to the design and look at the text that i've created so if i edit this first sketch what you'll see is this text has no thickness to it it's all just single lines and if i double click on it you'll see that i've used a font here called uh this name dot shx and when we look in the the fonts directory inside of fusion we'll notice that there's some fonts and then a line anything that ends in dot sh x inside of fusion is going to be a single line text and anything below that line is going to be a true type font which is going to be in the outline style text so you can kind of differentiate what text you're going to get by which side of the line you pick on there so you can see here i've just got some single line text if i go and i edit my other sketch that i have here you're going to see that i have some outline text if i click on that that's the font name that i used in the height and you can see that it definitely has an outline to it i also created some other text in this part just to show how the engrave and trace command work and you can see that here i've just made some single line text and some outline text and i didn't extrude either one of those so i just have those both set up as just it's just text right now so let's pop back over to manufacturer let's start adding some tool paths so we can see if we can understand this a little bit better so on i'm in the manufacturing environment i think i'm my camera set to a perspective for some reason i'm gonna switch that back to orthographic so i'm back in the manufacturing environment and i want to start off by first cutting this single line text so from the 2d menu i'm going to select the trace command and i'm going to grab that tool that i already have put in my part so it's a quarter inch harvey engraving tool that i use to add text if you watched the video that i did in the speedwise handle this is the tool i used to cut the style logo in there so i have my tool selected now i'm going to move on to my curve selections and i'm just going to click on that piece of text right there and click and you're going to see all the edges of it turn blue i don't need to worry about the heights tab here i'm going to jump right over to the passes tab so this tool path is meant to have the tip of the tool trace the whatever entity that's selected and in order to get it to do it at depth most of the time we set this on the heights tab but here we have an axial offset field i'm going to put an axial offset of negative .002 which is what i believe i used when i cut the logo on the style speedwise handles when i'm happy with my text i can go ahead and hit ok and now i get the text that appears in my part if i shut my models off when i click on my tool path you see that i just get a single line and if i turn my models back on you'll see that that text that those lines are just slightly below the surface so it makes it kind of hard to see what's going on because the the tip of the tool is below the surface of the part but that is a lot of times what you want to use to put part numbers or things like that on the part now i also have this slot that i cut and i wanted to show that i could also trace that even though it's a 3d uh you know sort of solid geometry i'll use the same tool this time i could just go grab that edge i could go to my passes tab and i could do an axial offset again of negative point zero zero two and i'll hit okay and now i have a tool path so if i were to turn off my models one more time and turn on the simulate turn my stock on um and hit play you'll see that i'm getting sort of a gouge line around there because i'm technically cutting into my part and if i turn the accuracy up i guess we can see the red line you can see that i'm getting that outline there even though it shows that it would be full of stock right now so i'll close this up and that is the trace command to start out with so how does the engrave command differ from the 2d menu i'm going to select engrave and i'm going to use the same tool this time for the contour selections i'm just going to click on the edges that i'd like to add the engrave to so i'll just go ahead and click on some edges here can be sort of a tedious process to do if you have uh letters with islands make sure you select the islands or this won't work quite right so i'll just keep going around and grabbing these edges on the top and just have a few more to do i'll go i'll grab all those and i'm also going to grab this little pocket that i made now i made this pocket really deep and i did that for a reason i want to show you how this works and another misunderstanding about the engrave command so those are my selections again i'm not going to do anything with heights i'm not going to really do anything with passes i'm just going to go over to the linking tab i don't have to do anything with linking so i'm when i'm done with that i'm just going to go ahead and hit ok and then i'll get my tool path now it did give me a warning that maybe it couldn't get in everywhere no passes the link somewhere or maybe there's a tight corner but what i wanted to show is that even though my pocket is really deep notice that my tool doesn't go down to that depth and maybe i can do this to kind of explain what's going on so switch the design workspace actually i don't have to do that i will just uh create a section view so i'm going to say manage inspect sorry and then i'm going to say section analysis and we'll just kind of drag a spot into the pocket and i'll hit okay now if i click on an engraved tool path again and i simulate it with all tool paths and the stock off if i put my mouse right about there and i back space this off a little bit what you'll see is with the engraved tool path the tool goes down as deep as it needs to so that the sides of the tool touch the profile that you're trying to cut so that's why you don't have to set any tool height on there you'll also notice that whenever you come up to the corner it kind of v's out and goes for those diagonal corners so if i shut this off and i turn off my analysis i'll shut off my model i'm just going to turn on my engrave tool path simulate this let's see uh i'll regenerate that quick we'll click on this and we'll simulate it there we go and then i'm going to turn on my stock my model is off actually my model is still on so let me turn that off now when i hit play what we'll see in the corners is it cuts the the trace on the bottom and then it pulls the tools up to the corner to give you more of a decorative look to the text that you're going to get so you get this kind of sharp v bottom and then it goes sharp to the corners so people get weird results with this because they think they want to engrave their text because that's what they're trying to do but they really want to trace it you also notice that i didn't have to set the depth on this another thing that i common error i see people do is on the heights tab they try to go to the bottom height and they try to put some negative number here to set the depth that they want to go to and really all you have to do is just select the geometry and select the tool and it will do the rest fusion will do the rest calculate the tool path so here again you can see that i have some regular uh stick text i'll probably just skip that now you guys don't know how that works from this example but i'm gonna do the 2d and engrave one more time and now this time i'm going to go same tool for the geometry i'm going to click on this text notice that i haven't even engraved this i haven't even cut it in the fusion side it's just a flat 2d sketch and i'll hit ok and i get my tool path and if i turn off my models again you'll see that it does the same thing it's able to find the edges of the sketch and it brings the sides of the tool down the the chamfer part of the tool down and touch it until it touches each side of that profile and sets the depth automatically so most the time people think they want to use engrave and they might think they want to use engrave and they get frustrated because they can't get rid of the result that they want usually what they really want is the trace command if you want to try to do something more decorative or fancy now some people may refer to this as v carving then engrave is the tool path that you want to use for that hope that helps to explain the differences between trace and engrave um again remember this video was generated by sort of user questions or submissions and if you have anything that you'd like me to cover on the channel make sure you send me an email to kevin mechanicaladvantage.com and i'll see if i can work your idea in hope you guys enjoyed this one and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Mechanical Advantage

Views: 3,732

Keywords: Autodesk, Autodesk Fusion 360, Fusion 360, Autodesk CAM, CAM, Inventor HSM, HSMWorks, SolidWorks, Trace, Engrave

Id: HKNbPPs-K2Y

Length: 10min 13sec (613 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 15 2021