How to speed up Vcarve?

CNC Machines Shapeoko
#1

Hi everyone,

I’ve started my own business with my Shapeoko 3 and had requests for plaques which involve vcarving. A plaque has lettering which take 45 mins to do (180x180). To me, this is too long and not cost effective.

Is there a way of how I can speed this up, without losing quality?

Much appreciated.

Gavin

#2
  • share your feeds and speeds and material used, and people will tell you how much faster you can push things
  • for intricate V-carving, Vectric VCarve/Aspire produce “better”/optimized toolpath compared to CC, for a business where time matters and if you are going to do a lot of V-carving, you should consider investing in that ?
  • if you have a stock Z axis, invest ina Z-plus or HDZ and you’ll be able to push feeds and speeds further.
1 Like
#3

also a few key factors determine V carve speed

  • Retract height. If you know your stock is flat, 0.05" is just fine

  • Plunge speed… as Julien says, with a Z/HDZ you can push much harder there

  • If you use Carbide Create, make smaller groups. CC will determine the number of passes
    based on the deepest element of the toolpath you’re creating, and then will apply that number of passes to ALL elements, regardless of how deep they are. If you have a mix of deep and not deep, it’s much faster to make separate toolpaths, that way the not deep stuff will get far fewer passes

2 Likes
#4

I use a 3 flute 60 degree bit and a 4 flute 90 degree bit. The more flutes the faster you can push it

#5

@fenrus Hey Arjan - Can you expand on that third point a little? How do you create a toolpath with more than one depth in CC? Or is the first mention of toolpath supposed to be “toolpath group” ?

#6

thickness is a function of “:width” with vcarving

so lets say you have 2 lines of text , one with a big bold font and then a somewhat smaller underneath (or even one line with a capital and then lower case)

if you select all it of it and then make a vcarve toolpath, the widest letter (from the top row) will define the number of passes even for the smaller 2nd line

but if you first select only the top line, make a vcarve path, then seperately select the 2nd row, and make a vcarve path… the 2nd line only gets the number of passes needed for it.

this concept is not just for text but for everything

3 Likes
#7

Ah… I see. It refers to a vcarve toolpath only. I misunderstood.

#8

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