Cutting the Sled

[eppic]

Hey All,

After an very annoying hiatus, I managed to put together and calibrate the maslow in two short sessions. I am going to do the first real cut, making the sled. I noticed that there is a toolpath sled, however there are no tabs in there that I saw and the tutorial doesn’t mention tabs at all.

Are you actually recommending cutting out the sled and parts without tabs, or should I be editing the tool paths to include tabs. If so, I would suggest the tutorial for beginners be updated with that perhaps?

Thanks,
Chris

[madgrizzle]

Yes, add tabs. There’s a forum wiki post on adding tabs:

How To: Tabs in Makercam

One of the most common problems that people run into when first entering into the CNC world is related to the creation of tabs. Since the Maslow is vertical, once you fully cut out a piece from your material, gravity takes over and it will fall or worse, get hung up in your sled. So, it’s common to add “tabs” to your project to prevent the piece from falling. These tabs are just small segments of uncut areas that hold the piece in place. After all cutting is done, you manually cut these tabs…

[eppic]

Thanks. Is there a way to delete individual tabs after creating them if there are more than you want?

[madgrizzle]

Yes. click on one and hit delete key. Just an fyi, sometimes it doesn’t seem to work and sometimes it deletes more than one (depending upon how you did it). I don’t fully understand it and just deal with it.

[eppic]

It wasn’t working, but now is. Strange.

I also found if you ‘stack’ them, it combines it into one.