I thought I know my way around Vcarve, DeskProto and 3D-Cut quite well but I ran into a problem today.

I have a simple rectangular board (happens to be about 7" x 5" ) and I want to bevel the top edges. I know I could just use a roundover bit and cut around the perimeter to do that in a few seconds. But that would limit me to the radius of the bit (I have only 1/4" radius). So I thought it should be really easy to do that with a ballnose bit and rather small stepover.

I want a bevel radius of 0.2" and a stepover of 0.01", that means I would have to go around the 4 edges about 32 times. With a total edge length of 24" and a feed rate of 120ipm that should only take 6 or 7 minutes theoretically.

I could not find a way to do this in 2.5D Vcarve at all (I know it is not intended for this purpose). But when I load the 3-d model into 3D-Cut or DeskProto all the strategies I tried lead to machine times of over an hour, sometimes much more. 3D-cut is especially bad because it has only linear finish cut strategies which try to machine the entire board surface which is stupid. DeskProto has a waterline toolpath strategy that should help but it takes forever to calculate and sometimes crashes.

It may be that Aspire can do that but unfortunately I don't have this software. I am almost tempted to hand write the g-code for this purpose.

This is such an elementary task, there should be a simple way to do this. Any idea?