First cut from top of stock too deep

Hello, I am having a lot of trouble with the machine cutting too deep from the top of the stock. I have zeroed it on the corner of the stock. Indicated the depth in meshcam and set my gcode to feed: 20, plunge 3, RPM 12000, stepover 25% and step down .0025 cutting aluminum. The initial cut dives down so far and crashes every time. What gives?

where do you have your Z zeroed at
top of work or bottom

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Note that the question from @jimtyre is about where you have Z set in your software, not the physical world. You indicated you zero on top of the material, so make sure that is what you have specified in the software as well.

I have it at the top of the work. I just tried top and center and it did the same thing.

I set it both physically and in Meshcam to be the top.

Is this the first time you have used the machine? Have you experienced this with other files?

At the risk of sounding like a complete imbecile…have you double checked your decimal point placement? I have done that… :frowning:

I have not had an issue in the past. I slowed it down to 10% and it plunged in about 2.5 mil then kept cutting at that depth! Impressed it could do that but not ideal. Can you help me understand in MeshCam, “program zero” has “Z Position” (top, center, bottom). I select top and the number is close to half of my stock height. What should I put in there?

Try making a simple test file in MeshCAM — if it has problems, upload it and let us know step-by-step how you are setting zero relative to the stock.

I’m not a Meshcam user so I’m just blindly tossing this out there. I’ve not seen an option to set Z zero in the center of stock, is there an option to set stock thickness and is that set correctly?

The stock thickness is set accurately. Maybe a better question for you all is “what cam program are you all using”?

Most folks here are using Carbide Create, but there are a fair number of folks using MeshCAM, and it was bundled w/ Nomads, and is the CAM module in Alibre Atom3D Workshop.