In today’s aggressive and fast-paced world, efficiency is a must. While it may feel like you are wasting precious time, it’s important to take time to sharpen the axe and introduce new techniques that help you and your team automate repetitive tasks. These techniques often eliminate wasted time and help reduce mistakes and inconsistencies.

We recently introduced one of these techniques at the office by creating a cutting tool for all our engineers to use when adding a stamp of our company logo to 3D parts designed in Onshape.

To help other product developers and Onshape users, I decided to create a quick and (fairly) easy 11-step guide for how to make your own reusuable cutting tool in Onshape. The guide is based on creating a cutting tool for a company logo, but could be used to create cutting tools for anything you desire: keyed holes, different types of joinery, etc. The concept could also be applied to other 3D design programs, such as SolidWorks or Fusion 360.

Please feel free to contact me with questions.

Creating the cutting tool.

1. Create a new Onshape document or Part Studio.

2. Create a new sketch “Logo Image” and import an image to trace.

Use the Front plane as the Sketch plane. The

3. Create another sketch “Cutting Tool” and trace the image.

Trace over the sections to be cut from other parts.

It is preferable to use the Dimension tool to fully constrain all entities in the sketch.

4. Extrude the backing for the cutting tool.

Extrude all faces in the “Cutting Tool” sketch, even those that will not be cut from other parts. Extrude along the y-axis from Front to Back.

The backing provides material so that the parts extruded in the next step can all be merged to create a single part. It will not be cut from other parts, so the Depth in most cases is inconsequential, except for when space constraints are concerned.

5. Add a Mate Connector to the Front face of the backing material.

6. Extrude the faces to be cut from other parts.

Extrude the faces from the “Cutting Tool” sketch that are to be cut from other parts. Extrude along the y-axis from Back to Front.

When extruding, be sure to select Add and to add the part created in Step 4 to the Merge scope. After this step, there should only be one part in the Part Studio

7. Rename the Part and the Part Studio.

Your new cutting tool is now ready for use!

The cutting tool can be used in any other Part Studio, whether it be in the same Onshape document or another.

8. Import the cutting tool part.

9. Use the Transform tool to scale the imported cutting tool’s X scale and Y scale.

The cutting tool can also be scaled along the Z axis if the depth of the cut needs to be adjusted.

10. Use the Transform tool to translate the imported cutting tool to the desired location.

11. Use the Boolean tool to subtract the cutting tool from the part.

After this step, the imported cutting tool should have disappeared from the list of Parts in the Part Studio. The cutting tool and the part it was cut from will have merged.