Hope this finds everyone safe and happy machining. I’ve been making some signs for my daughters wedding and I’m seeing something which I can’t explain with my vee bits.
Here’s one picture of something I carved using a brand new 90 deg vee bit I just purchased from Carbide.
Notice the “bumpy” carve. Has anyone seen this?
I’m using the default from Carbide Create. I’ve never used the federate settings and since I’m using a standard v-carve toolpath, you can’t set max depth.
It’s hard to take a crisp cut in pine — high speed steel (HSS) can be sharper than carbide so helps, but requires feeds and speeds which won’t overheat the tool.
Getting depth per pass and feeds/speeds can be tricky — one technique is to leave a roughing clearance and before taking the finishing pass spray with a fixative or lacquer which will harden the wood fibers.
Just re-running the file with a depth per pass set to take a single pass may help.
Ok. I understand that. How would set that for a single pass? When I select the tool I can change the Depth per pass (defaults to 0.1000), but I don’t have the option to change the max depth and even know what the depth is going to be because the bit will go as deep as needed to achieve the font width.
I’m sure I’m missing something really basic in what you described. I’ve had my machine for a few months and I’m still learning.
few things… 0.1" is a bit steep… try going to 0.08"
but to wills idea of a finishing pass… you can actually run your program two times.
as long as the first time you do this, right after zeroing the Z axis, you edit the “Z” field in the zeroing dialog and set it to -0.02"
this makes the actual cut be 0.02" higher than the zero you set.
then after the cut you go back to that screen, and add 0.02 to what is in the “Z” field (to go back to your original zero you set.
if you then run the program again… all you do is remove the last 0.02"
(same math applies if you replace 0.02 with 0.01 etc)
if you do not want to do the edit in that box, you can also jog up by 0.02" in then set your zero, but I find that less predictable than just typing the values in
