Hello. I am brand new to cnc wood working. I have a Romaxx machine loaded with Moi and Cut 3D.
I am trying to draw a gun stock and don't really know how to do the curved corners on the top and bottom of the butt stock. I am not sure which "tool" to use for the drawing or what box to draw it in. (3D I assume).
I realize I might be doing a bad job of explaining the problem since I am not used to the terminology-yet.
Any help would be much appreciated.

Tony G

Hi Tony, can you attach an image of the particular kind of gun stock that you'd like to construct?

That would probably help give something concrete to focus in on.

- Michael

I will ask my daughter when she gets home if she can show me how to post a picture. I need help with a lot of the computer things.

Thanks

Tony

No problem Tony - so when she helps, tell her to look for an "Attachments" button - it's one of the 4 buttons on the bottom of the type-in message area when you are writing a forum post, here:





When you push that button, an "Attachments" dialog will pop up - you'll need to do 2 steps to make the attachment, first push the "browse" button and then you will be able to pick which file you want to send:





Then after that is filled in, push the "Upload" button to actually send the file to the forum:





You can then close the attachments pop up once you have finished that upload.

After you have done that then write your message and push the "Post" button to send the message, and the file will be included as a link at the bottom of your message.

- Michael

I hope these come thru showing the curved portion where the wood meets the recoil pad.

Hi Tony, yup that image came through - but the area that you're talking about where the wood meets the recoil pad is pretty darn small in the image, it's hard for me to really see the shape in there, maybe a closer zoomed in image would be a lot clearer.

But if I understand correctly, it sounds like you just want to round off a sharp edge at the end of your shape?

For that kind of rounding you want to use the Construct > Fillet tool which is here:


If you have some shape like this with a sharp face on the end:



Then to round that off, select the edge here:



And then run the Construct > Fillet command and enter in a radius value for the radius of the rounded fillet to construct, which will make this result:




One thing to watch out for is that you need to select the edge of the solid in order for that part of the solid to be rounded. If you have some of the original construction curves that you used to create the solid from (by extruding or lofting or whatever), then it's not too unusual for those original curves to be sitting right there on the exact same spot as the edge that you want to round - when that happens it will interfere with you being able to pick the edge for filleting, so if that's happening to you, you need to hide or delete any extra curves that are right in your way so that you can select the edge.

Also have you had a chance to watch the video tutorials from here ? :
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/tutorials.htm


Both the Sunburst and the 6-legged pod videos do filleting as one of the construction steps in the tutorial. Those videos go through step by step pretty slowly with discussion of each step along the way so watching those could probably help explain how fillet works a bit more as well.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense or doesn't match what you are talking about. If I did not understand what you meant I may need to see a clearer image that's more zoomed in to the particular area that you're asking about.

- Michael

Thanks. I can try to get a picture showing what I am trying to do and explain it better. The very end needs to keep the sharp end but the piece of wood going back to the black rubber pad starts out as a 2x6 board. So the long section going from the black pad forward need to be contoured similar to the rounded corners on the black pad.

Yes, I did look at the tutorials and they helped with some of the steps I have planned.

Thanks. I will try to get a picture tomorrow.

Tony

I's probably easiest to make the stock and pad as one piece. Then when you have the shape you want, slice off the pad. That way, the curvatures of the the pad and stock will match exactly.

Hi Tony, does Steve's tip help? I'm still not really sure that I understand exactly what you've been asking about.

Like Steve mentions, if you want to have 2 pieces that look like they come from one continuous thing, it tends to be easiest to model it as one bigger piece and then cut that up into pieces rather than modeling each piece all on its own.

You can do that kind of cutting by drawing in a side profile and then using the Boolean difference command to cut your large solid by the curve - that will slice the solid up into 2 separate solids. The "Crown of clubs" video tutorial does that at one point as well.

- Michael

I hope the new picture helps. The block of wood is a 2+x6" piece of wood with the recoil pad screwed to it. The wood will be fastened to the table top and one side profiled and then turned over for the other side. The wood needs to be contoured like the black recoil pad. Until now I have been removing much of the wood on a milling machine and then finishing the process with a table top belt sander.

Hope this helps

Tony

Hi Tony, so I guess you just want to model the basic curved outline of the shoulder pad?

I'm still not entirely sure if I understand, but if you want to construct a block with a curved outline in MoI then the way you would do that is to run the Draw curve > Freeform > Control points command here:



Then go to the Front view, and draw a profile curve that has the shape you want, something like this for example:



Then you can construct a solid block from that profile curve by selecting it and running the Construct > Extrude command here:



That will produce a result like this:




In order to make a good match with your shoulder pad you will probably want to take a picture of it from straight above and then place that image into MoI as a background image so that you can see it in the viewport and use it as a tracing guide when you are drawing the curve.

To place a background image you use the View > Image command, as shown here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4506.2


Please let me know if I still did not understand what you are trying to do.

- Michael