Peter Parfitt – Tool Tray

My X-Carve is mounted in a purpose-built enclosure with a pair of drawers for the various CNC bits and pieces. I wanted to keep the drawers tidy and so this simple project provides a means of organising and presenting my various CNC cutters.

The organiser is a simple slab of walnut (but any wood could be used) which precisely fits the width of one of my drawers. I used a piece of walnut which had been left over from a project some time ago. I buy much of my material from a company called Timbersource who specialise in small orders placed through their web site and delivered within 3 working days by courier.

Using VCarve Pro I was able to design the layout, size and depth of the recesses needed to accommodate each of the cutters. The design process and toolpath creation took about 25 minutes and I have produced a video of the complete process. The work was completed using Universal G-Code Sender (UGCS) to relay the toolpath information and control the cutting on the CNC.

I used just 2 cutters, both ball nose, one with a 9.5 mm diameter and the other with a 6.35 mm diameter. VCarve Pro managed the cutting parameters for me. I really like the simplicity of the design environment and the ability to immediately create toolpaths and see a 3D representation of them before committing the work to the CNC. What particularly helped me was the new array copy toolpath feature in VCarve Pro, this gave me the ability to create an array of elements in which saved a lot of time in the design stage.