Simplified placement of support bridges

Cutting small pieces out of wood can be quite challenging if you don’t want to use a vacuum table. Whenever the cut around a separate piece is finished, the new free part tends to stick to the rotating tool. This leads to either broken pieces or a broken tool.

One solution could be to add support bridges to the model. These bridges connect the pieces of the model with the remaining material around. These bridges don’t really need to be big and stable – a width and height of half a millimeter should be sufficient.

Until v0.3 of [Bad Link] only a rectangular grid of support bridges was available. This works technically fine, but you need to fine-tune the positions of the model’s pieces before to avoid intersections of the support grid with small structures like holes or complex corners.

The new development version of PyCAM (see the subversion repository) adds the ability to distribute support bridges around each separate piece automatically. You just need to configure things like the average distance between two support bridges. Additionally the minimum number of support bridges required for each piece can be defined.

The resulting distribution will not look perfectly symmetrical, but all of your pieces and your tool will survive the process.

When everything is done, you can easily break apart all ofthe processed pieces of material.

The first [Bad Link] kit is almost done!