Guilloche!

[Hessel Oosten]

Hi Kirk,

Super !+!

I struggled a little bit tonight with your VERY nice pattern, but could not succeed in repeating it.

How did you set the number of lobes (96 and 32 in this case) ?

Please would you be so kind to attach the saved Vexx file here, to see easier what you are doing ?

Thanks,

Hessel

[Mooselake]

Hessel

I'm sort of working along with a book on Guilloche and Rose Engines and trying to duplicate some of the simpler patterns, of course no guarantee that this is the right or best way since I'm really using the wizard in unintended ways.

I used the Elliptical Order box to set the number of lobes, and slid the coefficient slider all the way to the right to get the "gently undulating" curve.  I've been setting both the inner and outer envelopes the same for now, but real rose engines used a variety of shapes.  Search for Bill Oombs for a rose engine simulator, trying that out is on my list for the future.  I set phase% to zero, only because it makes it easier to read and match up the numbers on successive traces.

Fill density is set to 1, Fill type to line.

The maximum radius will need to be adjusted to be greater than where you want the trace.  Use the Outband and Inband Radius sliders (if you click on them you can use the keyboard arrow keys for fine adjustments) to get the size where you want it.  When the outer ring looks right (it's actually the middle one in the screenshot) then click  next.

I closed Vexx before the second screenshot so some values might be a little different.  The Maximum Radius will change, set it back to your first value or something that gets the outer envelope outside your work, in this example I made it a little larger.  You'll do this every time, different values for max radius might make the slidering easier as the pattern gets smaller.

Use the InBand Radius to get the second trace close to the first one, then use the Phase slider to align the high spots so they touch.  You need to set both the inner and outer phase the same (or maybe not, if you want a different effect).  Then zoom in and get the two bumps almost touching, and adjust the phase if necessary.  When it looks good then click next and repeat, alternating a phase of zero and the value that lines them up.  After a couple passes it goes fairly fast.  Repeat until you get the desired effect or get tired of repeating

Hope that helps!  After rewatching the Vexx videos I'm going to try the celtic knot cutout again, maybe with the snip tool and reworking the knot dxf to make sure all the shapes are closed.  We'll see.  My inspiration is attached (this one is from a swiss watch company via a link on cnccookbook.com) but I'll never get that good.  No special reason for the celtic knot other than I like them and had this particular dxf sitting around.  Why try something easy when there's something much harder sitting around

The diamond dragon (aka drag bit) is on it's way, a couple 120 degree bits from drillman1 on eBay are here (shipped and at the post office half an hour after ordering Saturday afternoon on a US holiday weekend, highly recommend him if you eBay in the states), and I used a christmas gift card I'd forgotten about to order some 1.5"/38mm 20g brass "stamping" disks. I expect my problems are more operator than material, but brass is the traditional practice material.  I don't think I'll be trying gold, silver, or platinum or ordering a $100K US MADE Rose Engine...

Kirk

[Mooselake]

MADE is the brand of the Rose Engine, after the 4 maker's first initials.&nbsp; After I reread that it looked like US made, and while it is that's not helpful.&nbsp; Don't think Mrs. Moose is up to that anytime soon, but it's a beautiful machine that would look great in our living room, better than the new table and sofas <ducks>

Kirk

[Mooselake]

Am getting a bit frustrated.&nbsp; I created a guilloche pattern, grouped it, imported the dxf knot, grouped that, then put the knot under one side of the guilloche.&nbsp; No joy with the snipping tool, didn't see any effect from it.&nbsp; I then drew a simple box around the knot.&nbsp; Snip will see the lines in the knot, and delete them, but still will not touch any of the loops in the guilloche pattern.&nbsp; Also don't understand what subtract and intersect do, no matter which order I select the two groups, or even the guilloche and the square, can't seem to make either do anything.&nbsp; I was thinking they were boolean operations, but maybe not.

Minor nit, when I imported the dxf knot it changed the size of the workspace (the knot was 200x200 or so) and I couldn't find an option to change it back.&nbsp; Also at the scale I'm working at (25mm x 25mm) the grid is too coarse and I couldn't find a way to change the grid spacing.

Kirk

[Hessel Oosten]

Thanks Kirk !

Will try it a.s.a.p. but first I have to go on vacation for a week&nbsp; (order of the Mrs. here..

H.

[BMeyers]

Hessel

I'm sort of working along with a book on Guilloche and Rose Engines and trying to duplicate some of the simpler patterns, of course no guarantee that this is the right or best way since I'm really using the wizard in unintended ways.

I used the Elliptical Order box to set the number of lobes, and slid the coefficient slider all the way to the right to get the "gently undulating" curve.&nbsp; I've been setting both the inner and outer envelopes the same for now, but real rose engines used a variety of shapes.&nbsp; Search for Bill Oombs for a rose engine simulator, trying that out is on my list for the future.&nbsp; I set phase% to zero, only because it makes it easier to read and match up the numbers on successive traces.

Fill density is set to 1, Fill type to line.

The maximum radius will need to be adjusted to be greater than where you want the trace.&nbsp; Use the Outband and Inband Radius sliders (if you click on them you can use the keyboard arrow keys for fine adjustments) to get the size where you want it.&nbsp; When the outer ring looks right (it's actually the middle one in the screenshot) then click&nbsp; next.

I closed Vexx before the second screenshot so some values might be a little different.&nbsp; The Maximum Radius will change, set it back to your first value or something that gets the outer envelope outside your work, in this example I made it a little larger.&nbsp; You'll do this every time, different values for max radius might make the slidering easier as the pattern gets smaller.

Use the InBand Radius to get the second trace close to the first one, then use the Phase slider to align the high spots so they touch.&nbsp; You need to set both the inner and outer phase the same (or maybe not, if you want a different effect).&nbsp; Then zoom in and get the two bumps almost touching, and adjust the phase if necessary.&nbsp; When it looks good then click next and repeat, alternating a phase of zero and the value that lines them up.&nbsp; After a couple passes it goes fairly fast.&nbsp; Repeat until you get the desired effect or get tired of repeating

Hope that helps!&nbsp; After rewatching the Vexx videos I'm going to try the celtic knot cutout again, maybe with the snip tool and reworking the knot dxf to make sure all the shapes are closed.&nbsp; We'll see.&nbsp; My inspiration is attached (this one is from a swiss watch company via a link on cnccookbook.com) but I'll never get that good.&nbsp; No special reason for the celtic knot other than I like them and had this particular dxf sitting around.&nbsp; Why try something easy when there's something much harder sitting around

The diamond dragon (aka drag bit) is on it's way, a couple 120 degree bits from drillman1 on eBay are here (shipped and at the post office half an hour after ordering Saturday afternoon on a US holiday weekend, highly recommend him if you eBay in the states), and I used a christmas gift card I'd forgotten about to order some 1.5"/38mm 20g brass "stamping" disks. I expect my problems are more operator than material, but brass is the traditional practice material.&nbsp; I don't think I'll be trying gold, silver, or platinum or ordering a $100K US MADE Rose Engine...

Kirk

wonderful design.

[ArtF]

Thats awesome..

[Mooselake]

Incredible, but absolutely not mine, it's from a swiss watch company and done on a real rose engine.&nbsp; I wish I could do something like that.&nbsp; It's the dial on a probably $10K US watch, no price provided since if you have to ask...

The diamond drag bit came today, and with no preparation except changing the collet and thinking half the bit extension was enough (worked out to 5mm "cut depth", really spring compression), at 200mm/min both plunge and feed rate did the attached photo; took about 15 minutes.&nbsp; It's the same 25mm flourished test pattern I've now cut at 0.05 and 0.1mm doc and both 90 and 20 degree vbits.&nbsp; I could hear little thumps where it crossed other lines, but couldn't feel (it's so slow, and non-spinning, I gently held a finger on the cutter)&nbsp; them, and it doesn't appear to have lost any steps.&nbsp; First time the flourishes and center detail came out.&nbsp; Pretty good for $50 US, I think, plus it'll engrave on plastic, steel including stainless, and glass from other user's reports.&nbsp; Tried to convince Mrs. Moose that since it was a diamond she could share it as her upcoming birthday present, which worked about as well as you may have expected.

I'm going to try the 96 lobe barleycorn for grins, then see what lobe count (no idea what the official term is) will give a nice effect.&nbsp;

As always the photo doesn't do it justice, just a 100Weq LED desk lamp at an angle and a cell phone. The original changes as you change your viewing angle, and has a better jeweled effect than my vbit cuts.

Spent a few hours being net beaned and figured out how to run Bill Oombs' open source rose engine simulator on my W10 laptop.&nbsp; It's written in Java, compile your own for non-fruit computers, and a great visualization (makes me want to look closer at NetBeans) of how the cut will end up.&nbsp; I played with barleycorn until hauled off to dinner; it allows setting phase and position on every cut.&nbsp; While mostly intended for ornamental turning he does provide a couple PDFs describing how to do a spreadsheet to get the proper manually entered values for a couple popular guilloche patterns.&nbsp; It will provide g code, but for a unique machine Mr. Oombs built that uses (iirc) X, Z, and C and way different cutters (they call them cutting frames, I think what he's calling a drill is a conventional spindle).&nbsp; If I can resurrect my 2000-2002 Java memories I might take a look at his g code generation and see if I can make it produce X-Y-Z code.

There seems to be several techniques of creating guilloche patterns.&nbsp; There's the spirograph emulators, Art's very nice unique style, rose engines with rosettes of unlimited shapes, and geometric chucks (which can also be mounted on a rose engine) which seem to be closely related to spirograph patterns.&nbsp; T. S. Bazley's Index to the Geometric Chuck, published in 1875 where he used one to generate pen and ink drawings of a very large number of patterns and numbered them.&nbsp; Alan Battersby in the UK did a geometric chuck simulator that would reproduce Bazley patterns but his site has gone dark and archive.org doesn't seem to have captured the downloads.&nbsp; I have it up north, but not currently accessible.

I did say it was a rabbit hole...

Kirk

[Mooselake]

Today's effort, with the diamond drag at 300mm/minute and the usual 25mm square.&nbsp; Read that bigger routers do these at 4000mm/minute, might try one at the machine's 1000mm/minute max speed, and see what happens.&nbsp; Plan to keep the mouse over the non-physical (and really a black square) red mushroom button just in case.

This is the aforementioned celtic knot dxf with a line circular array on top, started with a line from center straight up, then did a 100 line circular array; could have done more.&nbsp; Much panning, zooming, and snipping later all the lines outside the knot were removed and this resulted.&nbsp; These lines would snip where the guilloche patterns would not.

I did get into a bit of an issue with the 3D rotate (the other CAD program uses middle click to pan, Vexx uses a right click), and couldn't figure out how to get back to upright and flat, so got as close as I could and just lived with it.

Got the $7US tool setter installed, reminding me how much I dislike crimping dupont connector pins, didn't help that the insulation was bigger than the pins were designed for. In retrospect I should have stripped it off and had both crimps go to bare copper.&nbsp; Took about 10 pins to get two that worked, more than normal, maybe need to do more than 2 a year to get better.&nbsp; Now need to play around with grbl commands to use it properly since bCNC's tool set tab is set up for one in a fixed position and drove the (conductive, diamond won't work) bit into the top of the cheap setter and then tried to move it around.

Despite being Amazon Prime the brass disks might be here Monday.&nbsp; The "ground shipped to offer such a low price" tool setter came yesterday.&nbsp; Ordered Tuesday; the hurricane might have slowed things down.&nbsp; Non-prime pool algaecide ordered the day after came before the prime shipments.&nbsp; Also have a batch of 50 1/32 to 1/8" mostly ball end mills, "slightly used" due Monday, and the 1/8"/3mm 7328 cast acrylic is already here for the lithophane party.

Thinking of trying a rotated array of gearotic gears next, just for fun.

Kirk

PS: searching for how to photograph engravings gives many hits on how to make them but nothing on how to actually take a decent picture.&nbsp; This one sparkles and the effect changes with the viewing angle

[Mooselake]

The 3x3 gear array crashed Carbide Create multiple times, maybe it was too many small vectors.&nbsp; So for fun here's today's project.&nbsp; I tried an online gcode optimizer on the second one, and while it reduced the rapid horizontal move total length it didn't change the engrave time noticeably.&nbsp; What it really needs is eliminating a number of unnecessary up and down movements by optimizing the cut paths.&nbsp; For example the dial circles could have been two cuts, not a series of ups and downs distracted by the tic marks.&nbsp; Oh, well, still took under 5 minutes although I've done some non-gearotic engraving that took well over an hour, a raster to vector converted pencil sketch that I worked on almost 10 years ago.&nbsp; Too many small artifacts that didn't get edited out.

There's a small gotcha in the "2" in the magnified picture, one side is an S that descends below the bottom line.&nbsp; These were un-snippable in Vexx.&nbsp; Not significant since it's the old editor.

This is clock dial from the Auggie wizard with a simple guilloche pattern overlaid on top, diamond dragged at 800mm/minute and with the spring compressed 5mm (half way), trying 2.5 was too shallow a cut.&nbsp; That 5mm, plus the 1mm safe height, consumes most of the cut time as it makes 200 trips up and down.

Kirk