9ft x 6.5” leopardwood on the shapeoko

Hi there, i have a project i am having some trouble with. I have a 9ft (108”) x 6.5” x 1.5” of leopard wood which i am basically making a 108” bowl. My plan was to do it on the shapeoko XXL in 3 sections. I want it go .75” deep and leave .75” lip all the way around the bowl.
Any one have any suggestions on how to program this on carbide to do it the most time efficient way? So far i programmed a 1/4” bit and its saying it will take 17 hours for the first section.
Suggestions on bits to use and speeds and feeds?

Thank you

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Now that’s a LARGE bowl :slight_smile:

  • If you are going to use your 1/4" endmill and CarbideCreate, you will need to use pretty aggressive settings to keep the cutting time to a reasonable value. What feeds and speeds do you have currently that result in a 17 hours toolpath ? For an aggressive roughing pass in hard wood with a (SHARP!) 1/4" bit I would probably target a 0.002" chipload, max out the RPMs, say to 30.000RPM on your router. Assuming you are using a 3-flute 1/4" endmill (#201 maybe?) that would translate to a required feedrate of 0.002 * 3 * 30.000 = 180ipm. For regular pocketing (whats CC supports), I would probably go easy on the depth per pass though, so I would probably make some test cuts using the feeds and speeds above at 0.04" per pass, it that works ok go up to 0.1" depth per pass (that will be a bit less than 50% of the endmill diameter, a.k.a. the safe zone)

  • for deep and large pockets, I tend to prefer going to adaptive clearing toolpaths, they will usually allow me to use a very large depth per pass, albeit with a very small stepover. I would probably try and use 0.375" depth per pass, some helical ramping down to that depth, and then adaptive arcs with 0.03" optimal load or something, and feeding fast. All of this being said, you would need to go and use Fusion360 (or another CAM package that supports adaptive clearing toolpaths) to generate that, and it may or may not be faster, hard to tell without playing with toolpaths a bit. If you can share your design file, I’ll be happy to give it a go.

  • others may be able to recommend specific tools better suited to rough a very large amount of material, but at the end of the day, there’s a limit to the achievable material removal rate on a Shapeoko.

Hey thanks for the tips! Headed to my fulltime job now. Will get back to you tonight with some more info!

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I wrote up a bit about this at:

The thing which I’d ask is that in removing the material, rather than doing it as tiny little chips which end up in a landfill, please consider working out a way to remove them in pieces large enough to be used — I’d love long thin strips for making chopsticks for instance (yeah, I couldn’t resist getting a Mini Workshop – Bridge City Tool Works ) and slightly larger pieces could be used for pens — doing this might help speed up clearing out the central area, and would make any additional time worthwhile.

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A photo or picture of the part would be of great help for us to guide you to success.

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If you have a plunge router you could just make a jig like a slab flattening jig and hog out the material that way. Seems like that would be a lot more efficient then trying to use the shapeoko.

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Well I guess as they say, when you have a new hammer, everything looks like a nail. I agree that unless you wanted to carve out details, an image or something like that, a router in a router table would probably be more efficient for this project.

Errr, Alex, that’s a photo of your STOCK… We need to see your project…do you have a CAD or drawing?

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