Automatically create cutouts and holes
Pro
How it works
Drill shapes for creating a cut out should be drawn as an IntelliShape in the part it belongs to.
Use positive IntelliShapes for this function, don’t use the Cut variants that remove material by themselves: use the shapes that ‘add material’ to the model.
These IntelliShapes can be suppressed so they won’t be visible in the model, but still do their job. Good to know: After the Drill operation, the shapes are set back to their original suppress state.
Based on these HWDrill shapes, the drill function creates the cut outs in all the parts with which they come into contact
Examples in existing catalog items
In the Para-Flex sample catalogs many parts contain drill shapes. They can be found when expanding a part (click on the plus sign in front of it). Look for a shape called HWDrill and if desired unsuppress it, they can be edited like every other IntelliShape in IronCAD.
Applying drills to parts
To provide parts with drilling shapes, works easy and intuitive. For example use the standard Shapes catalog to drag a shape on the relevant Part and resize/reshape it as desired. Keep in mind that these shapes are IntelliShapes, so they’ll become a component of the Part they’re dropped on.
Also the anchor of the IntelliShape has to point in the direction the cutter head will come from when drilling in real live.
STEP BY STEP
In short, after reshaping the drilling shape, there are a few standard points to be checked:
- Rename the IntelliShape to ‘HWDrill’.
- Make sure the anchor is pointing in the right direction (towards the cutter head).
- If needed, suppress the IntelliShape to keep your design clean.
Tips
- The cutting shape should be an intellishape that adds material (though it creates cut outs), so use the positive basic shapes, not the Cut variants.
- If the model should look neat, set the drill shape to Suppress.
Recognizing holes
Although the name of a shape to be used for a drill operation has to contain ‘HWDrill’, every text can be added to this text to make identifying the result of this drill shape easier. For example a shape called ‘HWDrill – Hinge’ can be found as cut out shape in a side panel called ‘Hole_HWDrill – Hinge’. That makes it easier to recognize the origin of the cut outs.
Tip: Recognition of the name/text ‘HWDrill’ by the drill tool isn’t case sensitive.
Divide the model into assemblies
Not only for overviewing the project for your own, but also for speeding up the process of drilling, it’s recommended to divide the model into assemblies. When for example having dowels to be drilled in a panel it also works clearly and faster to combine the dowels and the panel into one assembly. An additional advantage of grouping these parts is that the dowels can easily be calculated using a pattern depending on the panel size.
The use of smart panels
To be able to use automatic CNC-programming and visual appearance of materials, it’s recommended to use parts modelled using so called ‘Smart Panels’. This parts act like normal blocks in IronCAD, but have been expanded with additional intelligence. This adds driving the thickness of a panel, recognizing the bottom and top side and applying banding and CNC reference to edges. Panels used in the catalogs provided by Dynfos are build up from smart panels.
Drawing cut outs and holes
As mentioned, it’s important drill shapes at one side of a panel all have the Achor pointing in the same direction, towards the cutter head comes from. When the Anchor is pointing in the other direction, it depends on the settings in the post processor how this is handled.
It is possible, among other things, that holes with a ‘wrong’ anchor direction are simply ignored. Also the processor could generate two programs, each for one side of the panel; or add a so called NC-Stop to give the ability to rotate the panel on the machine. It’s even possible the CNC machine starts drilling the hole from the wrong side, even when the shape doesn’t protrude through the base plane.
Drilling functions and selecting items
Items in IronCAD can of course have been selected before using the Drill functions. The buttons available are Drill and Drill selected item(s). While items are selected, both functions can be used, but there are some differences between these two approaches:
Button: Drill selected items
This speeds up the drilling process by suppressing unselected parts. Note that these suppressed parts no longer cause drillings! In a single assembly with no drilling influences from outside into this assembly, this is not a problem. But keep in mind that the drilling result might be incomplete if parts from outside should drill into the selected items.
Selecting items and using normal Drill
Doing this does not offer any speed gain, but the drilling result is limited to the selected parts.
In the background, the complete 3D model is checked for drill shapes present, but the cut-outs are only applied to the selected parts.
