Rhinocam is a beast!

Ditching Meshcam. It’s like night and day. Rhinocam is better than meshcam in almost everyway. First off, boundaries for toolpaths are super precise. You can generate them from Rhino objects, edges, surfaces, create offsets that are accurate. Meshcam has option to only draw boundaries by hand and set option to not cut the top, not ideal at all. Overall I feel like I’ll waste less time sanding.

Only real issue I have with Rhinocam is creating the fret slots, it will not create optimized arcs but instead small linear curves that really make dirty gcode that doesn’t cut as cleanly as optimized. The arc fitting does work for straight fretted guitars where the arc stays within a straight XZ plane but will not work for the angled fret slots. Kind of a bummer but I can live with creating the gcode manually just for fan frets. I will see how the rhinocam fret slots cut out, or I’ll try pocketing them, we will see.

Cutting the body is super fun and easy. Can really customize the cut you want. The amount of different toolpaths you can generate is amazing, can customize your ramping easily and test simulate each part, unlike meshcam where you don’t really have much flexibility to test things out. So far no crashes either. Some parts do take awhile to generate like the 3D offset profiling I am using for fillet edges. Cuts exactly how I want to but generates a ton of code.

I love simulator also, really smooth and it keep your already ran toolpaths and can keep adding more toolpaths and checking them. Think I need to optimize the finishing passes a bit, seems to generate a lot of code. I just got the half inch ballmill that Highline Guitars Chris recommended.

Documentation is pretty decent, just wish they would describe why things are needed, instead of what they do. They also have a lot of videos online, some are hit and miss, but mostly useful. Like redundant stuff instead of advanced details of some advanced stuff. So I’m learning all the different ways to create optimized toolpaths. Really fun stuff.