On the mysterious countersinks

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For those of you wondering how Josh managed to pull of his Day 6 screw countersinks, mystery solved! Josh sent me this:

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Even more impressively, this is the testing pattern he ran to arrive at that:

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@Tony’s been working on a feature that, combined with Proofgrade materials, would dramatically simplify this. (Proofgrade materials ensure that we know the necessary power settings to engrave down a certain depth).

Note that Joshforge has a firmware bug that’s causing crashes during engraves, so he’s doing this with vector only!

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Ingenious. I would have never thought to approach it that way

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Oh wow! What a fantastic idea!! Thanks for sharing!

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Sorry but it is still a mystery to me. How do the red radial lines cause a cone to be carved out?

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Way cool! I guess that gives us at least one data point about engraving dot size versus speed and power :slight_smile:

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If I’m not mistaken, he’s weakening the area around the hole so that the screw acts like a wedge and pushes the wood aside. That would make it pack in nicely and let you screw it flush if you do it just right. Which Josh did.

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I haven’t had so much fun it front of a testing screen since that time I stayed up all night talking to the Schmitz twins.

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That was one of my assumptions when thinking about it. Thanks for clarifying. I love these little tricks/details!

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Would that only work on wood? Or would it work with acrylic?

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The “right” way to do this is with a 3D engrave, but this was a very clever solution. I don’t think this hack would work with acrylic, but 3D engraving will.

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Bear with me, I’m squinting at this image trying to make sense of it. So are we seeing a grid of power vs speed settings, some with multiple passes, and then some choice settings applied on the left to different radial patterns?

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You are seeing the very neat grid I started experimenting with, and then (on the left) the eventual chaos that resulted as it got later and later and my disciple broke down.

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I’ve learned it’s better to not assume - the X axis is speed and Y is power? Speed in mm per what unit of time?

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Very nice! Are you, by chance, using any of Illustrator’s scripting functionality, or were these all manually tuned?

If you can say… No pressure, of course!

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You mean intuition kicked in :slight_smile:

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I’m not sure if you are there yet, but I have a question on how the 3D engraving will work for things like countersinks, chamfers, and fillets.
Will we need to come up with the grey scale ourselves? Or can we assign it a color and the software will know that is a 45deg cut or a fillet?

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Great question - we don’t know the answer yet. We have some ideas but no final plans.

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That’s actually a very cool idea. Grayscale depth maps are definitely ideal in some cases (i.e. if you have a 3D model to generate it from in the first place) but for common/simple cases such as “fillet this edge” a solid fill of a specific color would be much easier to design with.

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I would really love something like that (assign color to function) because one of my use cases is kids with markers.