Here’s one for the hardware hopper:
https://hpi.de/baudisch/projects/kerfmeter.html
Kerfmeter cuts a 2cm Archimedean spiral and uses a motor to rotate it in place until it jams against the surrounding material; the angle at which the spiral jams allows Kerfmeter to infer kerf.
That’s clever.
Somebody certainly had their thinking cap on when they came up with that.
That is taking kerf measurements to a whole other level! Too much hardware for a hobby machine at least until it can be miniaturized but this would make sense for a large machine right now.
Blimey that’s a complex way of doing this:
After printing a couple of the ones above, I found that variations in the specific sheet were more significant than the material type, and I just use 0.1mm for everything.
Worked fine for many years.
Ditto, but, for whatever reason, I settled on 0.12mm.
Close enough!
.1 gives me nice tight fits with flipped acrylic inlay, and any kind of notch/tab in wood.
0.005” for joints (~0.12 mm), 0.006” for inlay.
For 1/8” woods. I adjust if the material is much thinner or thicker — kerf goes up as material thickness increases.
I guess more accurately kerf increases as speed decreases, which is almost the same thing,
Acrylics, foams, etc are different and I still measure them because I use them so rarely.
I set the width of the line to the kerf I want. Use Stroke to Path so there is a line on each side and use the one on the far side of the piece. There is still variation depending on humidity, room temperature, how long the wood has been sitting around, and probably more. But it is simple and close enough usually.
To anyone who might be reading @rbtdanforth’s reply (which is good technique) – he’s using a program called Inkscape.
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