CNC seems to be plunging Z axis a little bit too far?

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

To make a sign, you may find Carbide Create a bit easier to start with (I find MeshCAM overwhelming as well).

The nice thing is, mastery of the concepts there will (should?) transfer to MeshCAM — I’m assuming the terminology is consistent between the twain — does anyone know of any discrepancies? Hmm, we had a special set of notes on the Glossary for MakerCAM — guess we need to do the same for Carbide Create/MeshCAM… Shapeoko CNC Router, Rigid, Accurate, Reliable, and Affordable

Let's draw an "ellipse" with new users

(the title of this post hearkens back to a small book / card which Warren Chappell created, “Let’s make a “B” for Bennet” — I was fortunate to meet Mr. Chappell when he was Artist-in-Residence at UVA on a school field trip when I was young, and he was the author, along with his cousin Oscar Ogg, of a number of books I remember from my youth.) Note that the below is obsoleted in current versions of Carbide Create by the ability to asymmetrically scale a circle into an oval/ellipse. Okay, step-b…

Let's make a coaster

The prototypical first job for a Shapeoko is to cut a coaster — here we do this using Carbide Create, trying to make the job as simple as possible, but adding a bit of interest with an inlay, and increasing the utility of the object by rounding off the corners. Before any real setup it will be best to go into Job Setup and Clear the drawing, and set the measurement units — please use mm (metric) for this tutorial. Note that the feeds and speeds in the Carbide 3D charts are given in Imperial inc…

That latter in particular I want to work up as an in-depth tutorial which leaves nothing unsaid — please let me know if there’re any potential points of improvement, things left un-addressed, or any errors.