Raised Panel Doors - MDF

[Bill O'Connell]

I am trying to cut a four panel, raised panel door out of MDF. There is a tutorial for doing this in the Mastercam X2 Router Training Tutorial by In-House Solutions. The tutorial uses a 1/2" straight bit to cut a pocket between the stiles and rails and the panel and then uses a chamfer bit to slope the sidewalls of the pocket and clean up the corners. However, in a true raised panel door, the bottom of the "pocket" would be sloped away from the panel and the pocket walls would be squared, not sloped. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to slope the bottom of the pocket and also clean up the outside corners of the pocket?

[Trevor Bailey]

you are correct with the pocket, but you will also need to contour the slopes with another tool. use boundaries around the raised panels. then you can use a contour path with your "shape" cutter to establish the contour of the raised panels.

 

send me your file if you like and i will set up an example for you.

[mayday]

Im curios,

I have a shaper with all the tooling for making raised panel doors. how long does it take to cut them on a router verses the ol fashion way?

[Bill O'Connell]

It's not so much the time factor but:

1) It's one piece of MDF therefore it will move uniformly with temperature and humidity changes.

2) After it is set up on the router, you can basically stand back and let it run.

[Ployd]

Yeah, that is basically what you see on mass production cabinets at Lowes, Home Depot, RV's etc. Solid MDF with a vinyl skin overtop and roundend corners where they should be square. It would be nice to see smeone take the time to run a couple extra progams to square the corners.

[Trevor Bailey]

i looked at your file Bill and without some minor surface machining, you will not be able to get MC to do the raised floor and then have the egraving toolpath follow.

 

what level of software are you running?

[Bill O'Connell]

I am running MasterCam X2 MR2, Router with Engraving option

[Thee Starry™]

quote:

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It would be nice to see smeone take the time to run a couple extra progams to square the corners.

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KOMO Machine has that ability, oddly enough. In their cad/cam package "Router-Cim".

They spent a-lot of time on that feature and it works really well. I never got the chance to look at the code, but I saw the machine in action making raised panel doors, and by golly, they had square corners in a snap.