What do y’all do for a flattening pass. I tried some hickory today which I know is incredibly dense. I had it set to start at top and when it touched the wood it bogged down and jammed up. How do you lighten up the first cut. I’m using the Mcfly flattening bit from carbide.
The general suggestion has been to draw your own path that starts off the surface. I did one yesterday following that advice.
I drew a bunch of parallel lines that were wider than the material by the width of the bit. Then I connected those lines on the ends to make a path. You can either put in a bunch of short segments alternating sides of the material or draw one big line and then do a series of node edit/cut to remove the segments you don’t want. In the end is should be a single vector that you can trace up the page. Then do a contour no offset path to follow that vector. This eases the bit into the wood instead of putting it down in the center.
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Would you be able to post a pic of your screen so I can see what your talking about.
My depth of cut for my Whiteside 6210 is 0.010". Perhaps your depth of cut is too much. Surfacing bits cut shallow and fast or you get burning. By fast I mean IPM. You are right hickory is hard so you may have to reduce doc. Remember you have a lot of bit engagement for a trim router so you need to compensate for the lack of power of router with doc.
I think the mcfly was for surfacing mdf spoilboard. Mdf is very soft compared to hickory. You can surface your wood but compensate.
I draw in a square to represent my stock then use the Polyline tool to draw one continuous line with horizontal and vertical spacing half the diameter of the tool I want to use. Then find the high spot on your stock and set your Z zero on it.
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That is exactly what I was describing but I wasn’t smart enough to draw it as a single line to start. I drew one line and the used the array tool to create more and then connected the alternate ends. If I tried to draw it in one go I surely would have flubbed the spacing somewhere.
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When it comes to the line spacing I set the grid to a quarter or half the tool diameter I’m using and just let the line snap to the grid.
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That’s the issue I did put my depth of cut to .010 but it’s the initial cut that is too much and I don’t know how to change that.
Thank you for this. It makes since now I will program one up and try it in the morning.
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When you choose the tool you can modify the depth of cut for that one tool path. If you choose that tool again it will revert to C3D defaults for that tool, so you would need to modify tool again. When you choose tool edit tool menu.
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Ok ran the new path this morning and it cut great no issues. Thanks for the help
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