I was on the final pass and it crashed through the wall of my lidded box. Sadly, that was the pretty side of the board too. So I reset the lid to the opposite side of the base as I had enough wood to do so and ran the program again. This time it worked fine. The strange thing is, I had the feed rate overridden at 80%. so that it would jsut cut nice and smooth, which it was doing a great job of.
So I get the box cut out, sanded and flip the lid to add my art work with the 501 engraving tool. I reset the zeros, measured the tool and away it went, plunged through the lid and destroyed it. This is so frustrating. I have over 4 hours into designing and cutting.
The only thing that I did not do was to intitialize the machine again prior to doing the artwork. no clue as to why it would do this. this is the second piece that it has plunged into, the first piece was salvageable, this one is not.
I had double checked the zeros by rapid motion to the XY and plunged to within 6mm, it performed all of that.
Probably worth looking into the linear rail lubrication guide: https://docs.carbide3d.com/assembly/linear-guide-maintenance/Linear_Rail_and_Guide_Maintenance_02-17-2021_v1.0.pdf
Also, check the Z point on your engraving program and make sure you set it to the matching point…top of stock or bottom of stock for both.
Are you cutting slots just as narrow as the tool?
Where possible avoid slotting and add geometry and cut as a pocket
and/or
and consider leaving a roughing clearance and taking a finishing pass.
HI Josh, Thank you for the suggestion as I am prone to forgetting from time to time, but I checked this three times lol
I was cutting the slot the width of the tool
I will definitely look into this, wasn’t thinking I would need to just a month after getting the machine. So thank you. maybe I need to do this more often than I would have thought. great suggestion, thanks
I pulled it off, prior to reading Will’s advise on making a pocket, I cut another lid. it did very well until right at the end, I caught it trying to make a circle in the last corner, I paused it and shut it off. cut my tabs and sanded the corner down smooth and it looks great. This is a butter dish for my wife. She loves her Eagles and her Moose.
Hi Will,
Thank you for the suggestion and I tried your pocket appoach yesterday. A pocket cut does not recognize tabs. Even in the simulation it cuts clear to the bottom. Creating a smaller (or larger) item that is the same dimension as what I am trying to cut out to create the pocket also is not conducive to time saving. Granted, it would have been easy on this simple butter dish, but yesterday I needed to cut out a battery compartment that is not a square but rather a lot of various angles and rescalling did not work. Of all the other CNC mills that I have been around, granted, they are much bigger, more powerful machines, making and exterior cut to remove the part from the parent material, as I was trying to do, should be part of the contour process, not a pocket process, just my humble opinion. Maybe on the contour process I will slow the feeds and speed and see if that helps. The only way I could find to do it is to pocket cut to a the depth that the height of the tabs would be, then to change tooling and do a contour cut for the final amount that will leave the tabs. Thanks for the suggestion though. I will use it on simpler designs and leave it off the bottom the height of my tab and then set an addtional toolpath to make the final cut, unless you know if I did something wrong here.
Right, that’s why I note:
a pocket down to tab height or the penultimate pass.
In order to use tabs w/ an outlining pocket which was created by adding offset geometry you need two pieces of geometry:
- the original geometry, used for both the pocket and the final contour
- the offset geometry, used w/ the original for a pocket, which does not cut all the way through the stock:
and:
and one must add tabs to the inner geometry:
And as noted, two toolpaths:
- a pocket which cuts down to tab height
- a contour which starts at the bottom of the pocket and cuts from there down and includes tabs
and
which previews as:
I did not see where you had mentioned
I had not used the offset geometry prior to your response on this post. I tried it on this same battery box and see that it need a little tweeking to get the pocket size just right in order to have room for two passes.
I am curious though, at what thickness do you think this pocket method is necessary?
In the links.
It’s a matter of depth — if you get down deeper than half the diameter of the tool it should be considered.
That is a lot shallower than I would have thought.
Thanks for the info! still learning here.
Could you give some advise as to what I did wrong?
I set the Offset Vector at 0.3 so as to give an area bigger than the .25 cutting tool to create a pocket as advised. I cannot figure out why the toolpath would not pocket it out.
Try an offset of .32 Might be too tight in that corner.
even in the simulation it did not show the entire pocket getting cut out
that is what i had to do, but what I don’t understand is why it wouldn’t pocket the area it was asked to?
Post the .c2d file and we’ll try to look into it.
I appologize Will, I had modified the .c2d file to accomodate a larger pocket, try as I might, I can not get it to repeat the toolpath.