Easel's “drill hole” feature enables you to easily and efficiently carve holes the exact size of your chosen bit. The feature is designed to be used with your usual milling bits: drill holes have a specific toolpath that minimizes stress on milling bits. However, you can use your machine with drill bits, assuming you are only going to be drilling holes for a given project.
Advance Use: Circles to Drill Holes
In the top toolbar, select the "drill hole" icon. This will add a drill hole to your work area.
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Tips & Tricks: You can identify a drill hole in Easel by the distinct pattern around it. |
Once a drill hole is placed, set the depth of the hole in the Cut panel—just like you would for any other shape.
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Tips & Tricks: You can use the alignment tools to make sure your drill holes are placed in the right spot. |
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Important Info: The size of the drill hole will adjust with the size of the bit you are using to carve with. |
Drill holes have special toolpaths, enabling you to use milling bits for this feature instead of drill bits. Easel will direct your machine to cut in a vertical motion, raising the bit out of the material after each plunge at the depth per pass. This allows chips (the material removed from the hole) to escape, reducing stress on the bit and minimizing heat built up.
Holes are a little different from other shapes in the Easel toolbar. For example, they cannot be combined with other shapes.
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Tips & Tricks: Holes will always be “on top” of other shapes. As a result, they will always be carved before any other shapes in your project. If you want to carve holes last, consider making a two-stage carve. |
Advance Use: Circles to Drill Holes
At times, it may be necessary to convert a large number of circles in a project to drill holes. This use case will walk you through converting circle carves into drill holes. You can skip to a quick video walkthrough of the process using the link below.
In this example, the cribbage board file that was imported shows the intended drill holes were uploaded as circle carves.
Fortunately, there is a quick fix for converting circles to drill holes. On the right-hand side of the screen, in the toolbar, there is a brick icon. First, select your file by clicking on it, then click on the brick icon, this will open the Easel App Library.
Next, scroll down in the App Library until you see a window titled " Convert Circles to Drill Holes". Click on this this app.
This will open a window. On the right, there will be a picture of your selected object, and on the left, there will be the option to replace the existing design and a green "Import" button.
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Tips & Tricks: By default "Replace Existing" is not checked. If this remains unchecked the drill holes will import over the original design. This can cause a pocket carve to be simulated alongside the drill hole. Check the box will remove the original design and replace it with drill holes. |
Simply click on "Import" to convert the circles on the project into drill holes.