Cutting projects with tab-and-slot assembly can be challenging to get right.
Your design was for 5 mm and your stock turned out to be 4.79 mm … fits slip.
Worse, you designed for 3 mm and your stock was 3.07 mm thick … no fit!
Well, no more, because now you can easily adjust slots and tabs to match the stock you bought.
Slot / Tab Resizer in Lightburn 1.3
If you’ve ever gotten a tabbed box file or slotted ‘3D Puzzle’ meant for a specific material thickness and wanted to make it a different size, or with different material, you’ll understand what a pain it can be to adjust them. The new “Resize Slots” tool will search for slots or tabs for a specific thickness and let you choose a new size for them. There’s still room for improvement, but we’re excited about this one.
Oh man, I make dice boxes that have over 100 slots, this will make a huge difference. I used to buy material in bulk just to avoid having to redo it, this will make it a whole different ballgame!
Great function- and I don’t think VCarve has anything equivalent.
There’s definitely some cases for cross-tool flow, awkward as that may be. e.g. take a CNC project in VCarve, export vectors to Lightburn just so you can do the Slot/Tab Resize, re-export as vectors, and import the vectors back into VCarve to create CNC toolpaths.
Conversely, while Lightburn has a nesting scheme which refers you to an online tool that gives you a new file, IMHO the nesting function inside VCarve is much better, so there’s actually a case for using VCarve’s nesting and export as vectors for loading into LB for a laser job.
FYI VCarve Pro’s trial edition or “Makerspace Client Edition” are still limited in that you also need to go to the Makerspace master machine to do Save As Vectors, just like saving the g-code.
Of course, any jump to another tool like this is awkward as it won’t preserve toolpath ops or LB layer settings. But these functions from another platform may be valuable enough to do that. Resizing 50 tabs in a VCarve design may justify tool-hopping.
