Cheatsheet

CAD - Design the piece and export as DXF

Use your favourite CAD tool to create your design, but export it as DXF

  1. Design your piece as a carving inside a solid block of wax, this way you will have full control over things like the chamfering of the side walls, etc…
  2. Did I mention: Chamfer the sidewalls to 70 degrees at least (20 degrees away from perfect verticality) to be safe

CAM - MODELA Player 4

For our Roland SRM-20, we will use the already licensed software: MODELA Player 4

  1. Import DXF file
  2. Under “Machine Selection” Pick “SRM-20”
  3. Under “Add/Remove tool” create all the end-mills you will use during all your cuts.
    1. Extremely likely: A Roughing cut with a flat end-mill and a large tolerance/separation, to remove most of the material from the wax block
    2. Maybe: a finishing cut with a flat end-mill to make perfectly flat cuts on surfaces
    3. Extremely likely: A Finishing cut with a ball end-mill to create smooth finishes for surfaces that are non-flat.
  4. Create tool-paths for Roughing and Finishing: see below
  5. Export tool path files from Modela Player 4 and import them into the Roland VPanel Software, which will do the actual milling.
  6. Fix the wax bed into the Roland SRM-20
  7. Attach the wax block to the bed using abundant double-sided tape.
  8. For each of the cuts
    1. Insert the right end-mill into the machine
    2. Calibrate 0,0 for X and Y. This will be used for all subsequent cuts
    3. Calibrate Z=0. This will be recalibrated every time we change the end-mill.
    4. Launch the correct tool path file to be cut
    5. Find something to do. The initial roughing cut can easily take more than 1h since there is a lot of material to remove.

Roughing Tool-paths

  1. Select the area that will be cut
  2. ☝ Remember to leave a small area near the 0,0 that will be excluded from milling.
    1. This area will be used for all calibrations of Z=0, If we mill the entire surface, we will not be able to set the same Z correctly after the first tool mills on that surface.
  3. Write down the coordinates for the milling boundaries, since you will be using them across all the milling operations. notepad is good enough for this.

  1. Set margins to Manual and 0 inch
    1. Since you already designed your carving inside a solid block, you don’t have to use the Modeling Form Margin settings.

Finishing Tool-paths

  1. Similar to the roughing toolpaths, but without any tolerance/separation to the finished figure.
    1. We only use separation on roughing cuts since roughing is used to remove large material we will not need for sure and we want to be extra safe and avoid removing too much material.
    2. Safety separations for roughing are approx 0.4mm (or the size of your finishing end-mill).