Milling letters/design on arched face surface

[Jackal]

I have done a little bit of lettering/engraving on my mill. There are some motorcycle guys wanting me to engrave their gas caps & belt buckles.

How do you  engrave on an arched radius like this?

I have an old  Master cam program and can get the arch but the letters are giving me fits.

Thanks,
Jackal

[BR549]

DeskEngrave (;-) and its free.

(;-) TP

[RICH]

I need to do a similar task so will be interesting to see what folks post.
I was going to place the text on the 3D surface and restrict the cut depth so it only cut the letters ....I think that will work
but have yet to try it. That eliminates the need for say using an A axis and wrapping it like with Wrapper.
Know nothing about Master cam though.

RICH

[RICH]

DeskEngrave will place text on an arc but the text won't be laying  flat on the contoured surface.....??
RICH

[BR549]

AH you are doing domed engraving that is a different cat. Take the Dxf file from Deskengrave then apply it to a 3d dome surface and then ortho rectify it for the dome.

Easy to say not so easy to do.

(;-) TP

[RICH]

What Autocad 3D allows you to do is imprint ( in this case it would be text and my text would be "drawn" ) onto a selected suface and then you can extrude the text for depth
/ height. I haven't tried in Cambam such that the text would be selected as the 3D object and machining applied to it.

Just one of those little learning curves one needs to go through when doing stuff. No wonder my model gun will be years in the making.........

RICH

[ger21]

What Autocad 3D allows you to do is imprint ( in this case it would be text and my text would be "drawn" ) onto a selected surface

Learn something new every day. I found out that you need ACAD 2011 or higher to do this (time to upgrade). I'll have to do some research on this, as I'm not sure if you can actually use the projected text to create toolpaths. Depends on what type of entities are created.

Another option (cheaper than AutoCAD, but not cheap, is Vectrics Aspire, which can project toolpaths onto surfaces. In either case, you'll need a 3D model of the object you're engraving on.

[alenz]

A while back I wanted to engrave a shift pattern on a shift knob for my son and wrote up a little app to convert the flat pattern X-Y g-code to a spherical pattern. That’s the only time I used it. It may or may not do what you want, but you are welcome to give it a try.
Needless to say proceed with caution and at your own risk.
Al Lenz

'INSTRUCTIONS: Enter dia of sphere and burr (ball end mill).
'Touch off burr on top surface of sphere.
'Cut will be 1/2 burr dia, (enter zero to manually set depth).
'Pattern must be centered (X0, Y0) on sphere centerline
'Z dimensions will be adjusted for curvature of sphere
'Limit is +/- 45 deg of sphere upper surface
'Break long straight lines into short segments

[RICH]

Jerry,
ACAD 2007 has the 3D inprint command. Not sure if you can just use typed text and that's why i said drawn text ( text from  arcs and lines).

RICH

[ger21]

No, you can't use text, but you can explode text into polylines and imprint that. The command I was referring to is PROJECTGEOMETRY, which was new in 2011. I'll need to plat around with it.
http://www.cadforum.cz/cadforum_en/how-to-project-geometry-to-any-3d-surface-tip7297