How to get CNC to cut a piece out after carving?

[Topka]

Hi fellow makers!
I hope I can get some help from you.
I’m working on a Mandalorian blaster, 3D printed and assembled, and I thought that I make the grip out of wood to make it cooler than just 3D-print it. And I have a CNC!

So, I put my 3D part stl to the router and it carves it nicely as you can see on the picture below. But it only carved it and now I need to cut it out in a separate pass. Ideal would be to carve it out completely in one go but I can’t figure out how to do it. Could you please advise either how to carve it out in one go or how to make the 2nd pass to only go around the border and but it out using the STL I have?

Any hints are much appreciated! Thank you!

[sdj544]

Either use 2D Contour.

Or set the work depth lower (to the thickness of your piece of wood (hopefully you have calipers, if not you should) so that you don’t cut too deeply into the spoil board)

Make sure you either turn on ‘tabs’ in contour, or create some under design. Otherwise your work will move and get wrecked. You’ll need to cut them and then sand them off afterwards.

-S

[Topka]

Thank you!
I did set the depth equal to my material thickness but it does not go deeper after carving off the top curved shapes.

Also, 2d requires an SVG and I had a hard time creating a good SVG contour from this STL And then it’s tough to align them properly since 2d needs another bit and a separate pass. And then there are 3 Method options for vector toolpath (On the path, outline, fill) and I tried on the path but the bit thickness does not seem to be considered automatically so to make it correct size I need to increase the size a bit.

But thank you for the “tabs” idea! I think I figured out something I’m going to try.