Making Tabs

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Here is a quick tutorial for making tabs in Sketchup. Tabs are useful because they help hold the part that you are cutting in place. That way, it won’t accidentally get caught on the router bit causing the part to be damaged or possibly causing the CNC machine to lose steps.

Here’s how I make tabs In Sketchup. First, I start out by drawing a 0.25″ x 0.25″ square with the rectangle tool. Note: The size of this square will likely differ depending on the material and the part that you are cutting out. I then copy and paste that square and put it on the ends of the part, as you can see in the two picture below.

Next, delete the top and bottom lines that join the left and right sides of the small square.

The next thing to do is export the part to CamBam using the Sketchup to CamBam plugin. Once in CamBam, you must first select all of the lines by clicking and dragging. Next, use ctrl + p to convert to polylines and then ctrl + j to join them together.

In the left picture below, you can see that the toolpaths have already been generated. But wait a minute! The outside toolpath on the left side ended up on the inside instead. To fix this, right click the line, go to “polylines,” and, finally, click “reverse.” The right picture below shows the fixed part.

Below, You can see the rest of the parts laid out and tabbed. Since I’m cutting this out with a 0.25″ router bit, I left 0.3″ of space between each part so it would have a little bit of extra room.

Here are the same parts with the toolpaths generated in CamBam.

Finally, you can see the parts after being cut out with a CNC.

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