Feel free to add your own thoughts as I’m curious to see what everyone else wants, but mine is for digital rail bands. Shape 3D comes close. Click on one of the buttons and it will give a view of one slice with tangents. Unfortunately it doesn’t say what angle the tangent is. If the angle of the tangent(s) for the slice(s) is uniform throughout then your rail should also be uniform throughout. Currently I find I’m flying a bit blind when it comes to designing rails and keeping them uniform throughout in each of these programs. This might also be where some of those “dips” are coming from.
Yes the wobbles between control points is where your bumps and bunny ears are coming from.
In S3D:
In Slice view, click on the wireframe icon (3rd from last in my version)
You get 3D wireframe view, with lines joining all the control points. You can adjust control points in this view to get the lines running smooth . You can rotate the view and click profile and outline icons to get it exactly level.
Remember that a slice can affect the line beyond the next slice it connects to.
Think of the process as setting up the planer angles in manual cutting. It’s the flow of the planer that you are trying to emulate.
Pay attention to the nose and tail slices in S3D. Unlike APS these are true slices that map into successive slices. I now have mine good enough to where I can remove tail and nose intermediate slices and get the cuts to run smooth (1 intermediate slice!) - and have control over the transition into vee, hard rails and concave.
I can truly say that my board design took a leap forward when I moved to the S3D software - the 3d views really help.
One last thing - don’t try to do too much - I’ve had trouble with matching small undertucks in the rail (1/32") - the cuts are slightly different side to side (because of the direction of rotation of the cutting head?). I’ve found it easier to cut the rail square or beyond square and to hand shape the tucks in. Just square up the tail slice and it will carry through to the next one pretty well.
Red
Thanks for that.
This update to my post is probably not going to interest any of you hand shapers. It’s just a request that I am going to reput in and clarify to the Aku Shaper guys. Thought it might interest some people who use Shape3D and Aku Shaper. You should see two pics below. I’m also assuming you know what railbands are. If you don’t then I suggest you read Bill Barnfields post linked here as I think it explains railbands very well. http://www.swaylocks.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=248833;search_string=longboard%20rail%20bands;#248833
Carrying on, I believe that the angle of a railband should remain uniform throughout the length of the board. Could railbands be represented by tangents(?) as shown below in programs like Shape3D and Aku Shaper? That’s probably best put to the people at Aku Shaper and Shape3D but anyway. If this were possible then I think it would be possible to spot dips before they occur and if you look at the second “rail band” in picture two I think you can see why. By the way all this stuff I’m talking about would be what you see on screen before clicking the go button. The machine would then work out it’s tool path as it normally does from there. Hope this makes sense.
From the piccies you posted it looks like you need 6 passes not 4.
What do you think?
PS: I put your pics one under the other as they were stretching across the screen and I couldn’t read what you wrote…
Hope you don’t mind…
You could well be right. But the pics are just an example. I’m not expecting to shape to come off the machine with rails that look like an octagon or pentagon etc either if that’s what you meant. But more railbands to check to before clicking the go button would be nice. Maybe a preference letting the user decide how many “bands” they want to see?