I was following the really good tutorial (How to design a laser cut box - 3 designs & DXF making... free! - YouTube) to easily design boxes using finger joints. The problem is that is set-up for using laser cutting. But since the wood is 5-8mm thick there is no way doing it with the laser module.
Creating the dxf files was pretty easy but I can’t get Luban set-up correctly to cut the parts on the outer edge with the correct sizing of the used bit. It right now cuts directly on the lines of the dxf resulting in too small fingers and too large gaps for them… I would need Luban to mill the piece in a way that the lines in the dxf are also the dimensions of the final result thus the drill would run the outsites with an offset of the configured drill.
Here is the result using “OnPath”
One can easily see the the fingers will be too small when cut…
Here is the result using “outlines” which looks really strange since all outlines are cut twice…
I tried to import it, but I can’t really work with Fusion… I didn’t even find a way to get the dxf imported…Everything seems to be so complicated and absolutely not intuitive for me (and my eval license expires in two days). So I fear Fusion will not be a solution for me…
Fusion is free for hobbyists. Just have to renew yearly. They make it a little hard to find.
There is a definite learning curve but there really is no substitute. The other alternatives are fairly expensive. Luban is just too rudimentary to do much more than reliefs - and even that Fusion does much better.
There are a few threads on using Fusion here and videos on YouTube if you search for “snapmaker” and “Fusion 360”. I think one of the highly recommended guys with some vids is Rodney Shank (Strong?).
-S
I had a look at your file, I tried all sorts of ways of making it work including converting to SVG.
I did notice though that changing the bit from flat end mill to vbit in the Luban toolpath did seem to make a difference I didn’t check to make sure it was all correct though, it might well be carving in the wrong place.
Sorry I don’t have time to do any more investigation - probably best to contact Snapmaker support and send them the file.
I’ve seen this before. Try to open the dxf in Inkscape, select all objects and convert them to paths. Modify document properties to match the actual size of the path and save as svg. There is also a handy plugin for Inkscape that join paths if you need it.
I tried opening the dxf in Inkscape - it failed. It seems that the specifications of some image files are open to interpretation by various software developers.
Thank you for pointing me out that Fusion 360 is soo much cooler. And yes after importing the dxf-files it was pretty straight forward (after watching Fusion 360 CAD & CAM Tutorial for CNC Beginners [Snapmaker Academy] - YouTube) to set-up the correct settings and voilá it works. So result is - DON’T USE LUBAN to do such things
If you can get Fusion working for you, and you’re cutting out parts with cnc, then you can also make finger joints without the dogbones. I’ve made a couple of boxes now with 10mm ply, and just put a 0.75mm (to match the 1.5mm flat end mill that I cut the parts out with) radius on the edges that fit within the finger joints. Once I’d got the settings right, they fit together perfectly.
