A cross section of sorts ( warning, may cause Aspire acuteness)

I thought I would post today about a process in Aspire that I use quite a bit. We have some upcoming projects that we might be using it for, and I thought I would get a jump on the computer end of it. Sometimes we need a cross section of one component to mate with the profile of another piece. 

In this example I used the two rail sweep and a cross section(the concave c-shaped vector is the cross-section and the top and bottom lines are the 2 rails) This gave me the above trough model. If you haven't done much in this software, just study the pic and it should make sense :) Now that I have the "base shape" I can add our woodgrain texture to it. I imported a custom woodgrain image I made and applied it to the trough.

I then shrunk down the "spikey" texture and smoothed it a little. These simple steps are nothing more than a couple of mouse clicks, very easy stuff. The below picture shows the results of these two steps.

I need two parts to this model in real life. The front "trough" board I created, and an end cap on the right side.
Being that we will just be butt joining them together, I want the software and router to do all the work in making them match. This will save considerable hand finishing after the parts are glued together. I then drew the "end cap" square, which is the second part to this model. To get an accurate cross section, I drew a rectangle box around the whole component, but left a 1/16" space on the right side.

This is the part where you save the model!!! After saving I cleared the area inside the vector box I drew. This left a tiny sliver of the end of the board.

I will finish posting the rest of this tomorrow, It's off to a good start!



JO