Greetings,
I’m new to CNC and quite pleased with the process of the new journey.
Began with reading through the forums specifically looking for the machine capabilities, wow! Ordered a Shapeoko a week ago and have since been reading through the setup and first usage posts. I’ve also downloaded Carbide Create (CC) and Carbide Motion (CM) and started some beginner testing.
One test I would like to do immediately after ‘Hello World’ is to run my own variation of this project to test my CC .c2d file creation and ability to load into CM and successfully run a project before mounting the router and cutting. I’ve only seen the ‘Hello World’ test file as a .tap or GRBL file but not as a CC file. I’ll be the first to admit that I could be missing it though. But if it doesn’t exist I have three questions relating to the toolpath:
@MikeG the only thing that I did differently was that after driving a bit straight through my workpiece and into the spoilboard, was to practice cutting air. I would set up my designs and my material, zero all 3 axis’, then move my Z-axis up about 0.5 inches above my maximum cut depth and re-zero only my Z axis. I then went through the entire cut sequence (cutter turned off) to regain some faith in my machine after snapping a bit into small metal shards. I found what did…and didn’t work.
Thank you both! I’d thought about the “air-cutting” idea a fair bit. Though I like it,and will likely employ it, I thought drawing would be safer for the tooling until I’m sure I have the adjustments made correctly.
I did have the foresite to take a look at the .tap file and did see the ‘G’ settings followed by the ‘Z, X and Y’ parameters. Thought it might be in inches, so thank you for pointing out the switch to metric!
Bob - Obviously I desire to be cautious about getting off-topic, but how was the eclipse from KSLE last August? I was on a ridge south of Baker City for the event, spectacular.
@MikeG my house was directly under the center, of the path of totality. I had a full house with about ½ of the folks from out-of-town. I had “timed music” so that at the precise second of totality, the 48th Highland Bagpipes came on at full volume playing Amazing Grace. My neighbors, rather than complaining, thanked me for my musical choice. If I’m still “here” in 2024, I may make the trek to Texas for the next one. The Great American Eclipse of 2017 was my first and blew my mind!
To keep this Shapeoko-centered…I wonder how much a person could make, making little medallions to sell as souvenirs at an eclipse. Materials cost would be minimal, and ROI could be substantial. A 20¢ piece of brass sold at $5.00 wouldn’t be a terrible profit…?
@BoscoBob - Bagpipes, really, are you Scottish too?!
Spent a lot of time reading about eclipse followers before going to see this one. My first was in '79 in the PDX area, unfortunately it was a cloudy February morning during the totality. Yep, the next will be starting somewhere near the Yucatan and departing somewhere off the northern seaboard, hoping to see that one too. The 2017 eclipse was truly surreal for me. I went with a rocket scientist, literally, and he started applauding during the totality, I wished I were a poet to have some sense of capturing in words what that was like.
How does one design a medallion that capture what a poet cannot?
Received the XXL yesterday and successfully setup and ran the CC ‘Hello World’ test. This morning I was able to run my ‘Hello World’ variation. My primary thought from this:
From the image you can see that my paper wasn’t very flat. This is due to the cardboard backer variations and trying to set the pen ‘Z’ axis to zero. Lesson being, be sure your project surface is flat. There are a lot of threads that already cover this and I won’t go into it here. I’m not to worried about the pen tool ‘Z’ setting itself being off. Wit the ink bleed etc. I think my time will be better spent learning to “touch off” the real working tooling.
