Carbide CRAZY designs?

I don’t think it does. I’ve recently did a carve that skipped letters in the middle of a word. A word, mind you, that I typed out without editing!

Again, I’m more convinced that it’s slightly crazed :crazy_face:

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That’s true too.
I think that somedays, like my wife, it just wants to screw with me. :rofl: :rofl:

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I used to watch Calcomp 965 plotters work. It was interesting to try and predict the moves.

Duplicate geometry would tear the paper from over saturation

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Our Zeta Graphics plotters were built like tanks and had a voice-coil linear actuator for the pen-down movement. It developed enough force that we could run ballpoint pens at a really fast speed for draft plots (or anything that didn’t need the elegant liquid-ink lines). At the time the company folded we had developed vinyl-cutting prototypes using a swivel knife (shades of Stingray) that dropped in in place of a pen (we just adjusted the voice-coil current to set the cutting force), but Roland (I think it was) pretty much had that market tied up…

I had an idea for a production design and set the design up for stage running on my machine. The project would cut out 60 designs over the course of just under 4 hours. So, in theory, I could make two complete runs of the program for 120 pieces in one day. The problem I was running into was the machine program treated the whole design as one big progect and would randomly jump all over the table with long travel times to each part.

I was hoping for a singularity of one cross line of work at a time and then a second line and then when the machine started work on the third line, i could remove the first line of carvings and then replace with new material so it would be ready for the next run, and so and and so forth. This way I basically could run the machine from the time I got to my shop until the time I finished the second run cycle, completing 120 pieces per day. I needed 6 days of running to complete 6 different types of carves for a set of 6 items per set, which would give me 120 sets of completed designs.

I realized that the machine randomized everything, and made me think it hated me and didnt want to follow my desires for cutting, like a defiant son that would look at me and still reach over to touch something I just told him not to touch. Hahaha.

What I realized I was going to have to do was a workaround. I would have to create each carve as one individual carve and do this along the path I wanted the machine to carve in. This way I gained back control of the direction of the machine’s movement, reduced cycle times by a ton, because the machine wasnt traveling across the whole surface to carve a little over in the far corner and then traveling back to the front corner for a bit of carving and then back to another far corner.

So in essence, I got the boy (my machine) to listen and do what I wanted it to do my way, and now I smile at how obedient my machine is, even though it looks at me with scolding eyes while doing what I ask it to do. Lol

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This is the very best story about a very naughty CNC machine. In my day I would have gotten a good ol’ spanking with a wooden spoon for being such an idiot! Can’t do that to my Pro5 though!! :rofl:

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