can't make it work

[fenio]

Hey... first of all thanks for creating this macro/addon. Seems it's the only one covering joints. Is it compatible with the most recent version of FreeCAD? I'm getting pretty weird results. I was doing thing like that:

And I simply marked surface when I wanted to do joint and it createad lovely dovetail shape.

And now I'm trying to do other part which will connect to that created in the first step. So I'm doing the most simple equivalent perpendicular shape and trying to create dovetail connector on it. And it's simply not possible.

Tried to mark edges, tried to mark surfaces, tried every damn thing and it can't create dovetail stuff on perpendicular shape.

It seems it stucks to create one occurence of let's call it connector. Now I'm wondering how it was able to create dovetail shape on quite complicated project but it can't do so on simple perpendicular shape.

So once again. Should it work with the most recent FreeCAD?

[fenio]

The most simple sketch like this:

Then pad with defaults:

Then I'm trying to do simple dovetail like this

And I'm ending up with this:

What am I doing wrong?

[mwganson]

This is a complicated macro to use and will require much experimentation with the object properties. Set the Show Tool property to true temporarily. This lets you see the hidden cutting tool that gets created and used behind the scenes. Then adjust the Angle property to see what happens. Probably putting it to 90 aligns the tool correctly. If not look at Angle X and Angle Y. Try also setting Use Odd to true/false to see what happens there. It can help to get the teeth to align.

[fenio]

Thank you @mwganson. Hint with Show Tool property is very useful. This way I managed to get desired result but definitely weird things are happening behind the scene. The surface I'm trying to apply that dovetail is 141mm wide... by default this joint has 50mm width so it should easily fit wit some spare space on both sides but somehow it tries to cover whole surface. After some playing with angle with Show Tool it shows like this:

Then when I turn Show Tool off it changes to:

Which doesn't really have sense to me. It looks like cutting tool operates on different width but in the end creates specified width. It's not super intuitive but well I managed to get what I wanted so feel free to close the ticket if that's the way it should behave. Thanks a lot for your help again ;)

[mwganson]

I'm not sure what you're trying to do exactly, so it's hard to give exact advice. I suggest to keep experimenting with the various properties. As I recall, the macro will always want to cut away material, so it's not going to add the teeth. You need to cut away the excess material. Experiment with changing the various dimension properties. You are correct in that it's not a very intuitive process.