Anyone at @Carbide3D had a chance to peruse and evaluate my previous feature request results and suggestion from back in March to improve quality of advance VCarve inlays in Carbide Create for facegrain (and endgrain by extension), by any chance?
TL:DR: Problem - Chipout occurs because of plunge position being at the very tip of very small angled features (60degree and smaller).
Diagnosis - Creates bad, unsupported conditions when the v-bit comes back round to finish the other side of the tip feature which significantly increase the chipout result. Alternative test found, when plnuge position was not on corners with <60degree angles, chipout result was greatly reduced for the fragile <60degree feature. Currently, no way to avoid this issue (delicate feature corners as entry position) as plunge position is automatically set.
What followed: Rationalisation of the effect via a couple batch tests. Discussion of best fix suggestions were made.
Conclusion - At end of request thread, list of suggestions made and the best one was considered to be:
add an option for manual ability to select plunge position node for each feature in advance vcarve - so user can select away from default bottom-left entry position instead to select any corner/node they want (so have the option to select less fragile corners to enter on, or set slightly-off from the very tip node of the corner if all corners are fragile). Automated solutions are great too but considered manual approach to be most flexible to solve edge cases since you have the ‘add node’ interface menu already which could be augmented for this purpose.
Another side-suggestion (considered lower-hanging fruit but less likely to work) was to allow user to select conventional or climb cutting.
Sorry to tag you but I figured you made the youtube tutorial on advance vcarve for Carbide3D, I ought to fire a quick one your direction for consideration.
I’ve been making advance vcarves inlays for years now; originally on the MPCNC, then Shapeoko Pro, and now Shapeoko 5 (by far the best).
The original post linked in my previous message above is long (the idea evolved over a couple days of posting to that thread) but it details the initial steps I went through trying to rationalise why, using carbide create, I can’t reliably (i.e. commercially) do more detailed v-carves with mental confidence it won’t chipout. I don’t do most designs now because of this and deliberate still moving to another software (I use 30deg vbit and 1/16" endmill/1/8" endmill scale of roughing in my inlays).
Before doing that, I decided to do a little experimenting to establish what was causing the problem to see what the cause was and if I could make a CC work-around. But, my initial findings established it’s on the backend and not efficiently fixable by the user.
If you get the time, could you peruse my original posting? You’re a very busy guy, of course, but it might be of interest to you and the C3D team and might provide some new usable insights to advance the CC offering.
The final solution suggestions list I made is in the final few messages in the thread is linked below. I did make suggestion lists 2 or 3 times earlier in the thread but it was an evolving idea so those lists are not to be considered as deeply but worth a read to understand what I was trying to solve for:
Your testing looks thorough, and your suggestions on fixing this makes sense. I don’t touch the software though so it’s out of my control, but I can promise I’ll pass this on to the dev team to have a look.
I just wanted to make sure this had been seen and to hear from C3D about what action, if any, they wanted to take on it.
In one line, the issue solution revolves around: ‘If the corners angle is acute (I’ve set that to mean <60deg primarily), never place the plunge position on that corner (i.e. dividing acute angle corners into 2 halves by entering plunge right at the tip is bad.)’
Acute angle corner is where only <60deg out of 360deg is material, for clarification. The inverse of this is not what i’m talking about (where 300deg is material). My tests were on Male inlays but probably applies to the female halves too where this scenario applies.
Positioning plunge literally anywhere else except for right on the tip node of the acute angle corner would fix the issue:
If a particular feature has other corners with angles LARGER than this, place plunge position there as they are unaffected as far as my experience indicates and can still be used the current way.
If all a particular features angles are acute, a fix for this would be even if plunge position is placed literally just before the corner (clockwise preferably imo), it would also fix it for that edge case imo.
The (1) anti-clockwise conventional cut direction with the (2) clockwise endmill rotation direction, plus the (3) splitting acute corners in half, is what’s screwing it. The key part of that being (3).
Any solution revolving around that 1-liner above would work. This makes high detail in facegrain (and so endgrain) far more predictably successful rather than predictably unsuccessful.