Curved Cabinet Design

[John Ming]

Hi.

I'm going to be building a group of curved reception desks (all desks the same design/size, but with slightly different materials and finishes). It will be a basic curved-wall design, with a pair of standard-height base cabients behind the taller curved wall that will support a curved countertop. What I'm trying to figure out is to what degree I can use eCabs to model this design, both from a rendering/presentation point of view as well as a CNC-cutting point of view.

A search of this forum turned up this prior posting, which is very similar to what I have in mind:

http://www.thermwood.com/forums/viewtop ... ed+cabinet

The highly complex (and highly impressive...) examples by Jerry Johnson and Kerry Fullington indicate that this is possible, but they are far more complex than I'm after. The example posted by George Davidson is VERY close to the curved wall design that the client has in mind, but even that one is "overdone" from the standpoint of multi-level curved faces on the front.

Rather than spending many hours with trial-and-error experiments of my own, I'd appreciate guidance on the following points/issues:

1) To create the curved wall structure (not the face/skin panels, but the sub-structure itself), do I start with a standard base cabinet and then begin shaping/modifying the components of that base cabinet into what I want? George's post in that thread seems to indicate this. Are the long, curved top and bottom panels in that design reshaped versions of the top panel and deck panel? Are the vertical risers the left end, right end, and internal partitions that have been modified with the Part Editor? If the answers to the above two questions are Yes, then will eCabs also preserve any of the specified joinery (i.e., blind dadoes) that connect those original cabinet parts? Or do I need to be designing all the parts as display panels, which Kerry's posting alludes to? As far as I know, I wouldn't be able to specify any joinery details between interconnecting display panels - they would just have to be butt joints. Is that accurate?

2) Through whatever means I use to create the curved parts, I presume that eCabs (and I'm also using the ShopBot Link) would be able to nest and cut these structural parts for me. Is the nesting process sophisticated enough to efficiently place identical curved parts close to each other for good material yield, or is it going to use a simple "bounding rectangle" around the curved parts and thus decrease the sheet yield? And finally, I'm embarrassed to have to ask this, but am I correct in assuming that Display Panels, if specified with the correct material type, will be included in the nesting process along with other "standard" rectangular cabinet parts? Kerry's posting seems to indicate this, but as you can probably tell, I've never done much with display panels or boards in my prior plain-vanilla cabinet designs.

As always, advice and ideas from the gurus on this forum will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

John

[Michael S Murray]

HI John,
Honestly,I love e-cabs,but radius work is tough to do in e-cabs.
Your really have to build your parts in part editor, starting with a display panel. This will give you something that will machine.
If your looking for something to render, I would use another approach sac as cabinets,etc.
I will attach a couple pictures of easier radius work that was done in e-cabs using display parts.
Hope this helps