I did a little more experimenting with the Cut3D demo and did a little more digging on the Vectric support site and found out that there is a trick to getting the dish to cut without cutting it out or machining a bunch of surface that doesn’t need to be machined.  On page two, if you set the machining boundary to symmetrical with .001 in the box next to it and use model silhouette checked it will carve the dish normally.  However, during the course of the experimentation I found that my normal dish is too vertical at the lip which causes pixelation in Cut3D at the join between the dish and the surface.  It looks like it would only take a minute to sand out after the cut but if your tool path is right and the model is right that’s a minute you shouldn’t need to waste sanding something you can machine smooth in the first place.  I’ve found that If I leave a lip on my dishes of .09 it will leave it as smooth as I created it in the first place, so that’s what I’ll be doing from now on.

If you’ve purchased a dished model and would like me to shoot you one with a lip I’d be glad to do it for you, just email me or use the contact form.

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