Creating a Design for CNC Milling
Unlike the rough sketch on a small piece of paper, the design stage must result in a completely specified design in which all the geometric features are present, accu- rately sized and precisely positioned. Whether the design is produced on paper or
on a computer monitor depends on the complexity of the design and the nature of the features.
Some designs consist of simple arrangements of easily defined shapes such as straight lines and circles, but anything other than the simplest of shapes will ben- efit from the use of appropriate design software. The design shown in Fig. 1-3 is a simple shape that could be fully specified on a small piece of paper and hand coded directly into the editor of a CNC package
without much trouble.
The design shown in Fig. 1-4 is an apparently simple design that can easily be sketched on paper, but cannot be fully specified without some significant mathe- matical calculations to identify the intersection points at A and B. Without those points, there is insufficient information to be able to create a CNC program.
