After a number of successful vcarve inlays I’m confounded by this failure. There is one element where the plug is larger than the socket, and I can’t figure out why. The parts a mesh at the ends, but hit an obstacle in the middle of the carving. Here are pictures of the plug and socket. One element is about 2 mm too long/short. This may not be the only problem, but it is the one that is highlighted when I put the parts together with a piece of carbon paper between them to mark the high spots.
If I only needed one I’d hand carve it to fit, but I’ll need to do about 16 of these.
If you’re measuring to the floor of the female, it should be larger than the male.
Try measuring the male (Red) to the ends, and see where that fits on the female. It should about the glue gap (5mm - 4.5mm = 0.5mm) up from the bottom (Green)
90 deg simply because that’s what the C3D “how to make perfect vcarve inlays” tutorial specified, and it worked great on a few prior attempts. I’m happy to use anything, but I’m brand new at this and had no reason to switch to something different from what the experts had suggested.
Yes, everything else fit as expected (I repeated this a couple of times, so I cut one of the plugs up so I could see that other elements fit correctly), leaving about the specified 1.5 mm gap when pressed together. This one element is either too long in the male part or too short in the female. When I pressed them together with carbon paper to mark the high spots only the very ends of that element were marked.
I think I see the problem. There’s a bug, or anomaly where very thin vectors that come to a point don’t get cut all the way. You can square off the end of the vector, or offset it by a very small amount.
Thank you! I’ll edit the file and try again. This started with a SVG downloaded from one of the drawing sellers so I’m sure it’s not been optimized for CNC work. I’m having a really hard time seeing exactly what you’re doing in the second picture, but I think I can blunt the ends without spoiling the design.
I offset the vector by 0.025mm (0.001"), so it rounded off the ends. It should work without any further modification. Just zoom in to really sharp corners to make sure the toolpath makes it to the end.
I used the 60 deg tool for this rather than the 90, but don’t understand why I’d choose one over the other in a given situation.
I also need to come up with a system for maintaining precise alignment of the layers and workpiece, as you can see I was slightly off in this practice piece.
