Local Maintenance

[DogwoodCo.Woodworks (Scott T Brinkmeyer)]

I know this is a long shot - Are there any Carbide 3D approved service/maintenance techs? Specifically in the Houston, TX area?

[wmoy (Winston)]

Carbide does not have any remote or traveling service technicians. You can almost certainly find users in the area, but there no “Carbide Certified” list of folks we can recommend. If you have specific procedures or questions you’d like help with, we can try to point you in the right direction though.

[avetrano (ANTHONY VETRANO)]

Hi Scott

I am in Houston maybe I can help. What are you wanting to do/get performed and or learn? What Machine are you using?

Anthony

[DogwoodCo.Woodworks (Scott T Brinkmeyer)]

Thanks for the offer. Besides trying to get my head around the 3D cuts, I need some help dialing in some things. Circles for example - they’re never quite equal. Similarly, trying to create a contour inside a smaller counter of the same size doesn’t stay centered withing the larger one.

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

For sizing things, if the machine is mechanically sound, other considerations are:

• feeds and speeds
• toolpaths
• adding geometry and cutting as a pocket down to tab height/the penultimate pass and leaving a roughing clearance — where possible avoid slotting and add geometry and cut as a pocket

Making vacuum hose adapters

While cutting up vacuum extension wands for this is expedient, it’s a bit problematic given that Shop Vac recently filed for bankruptcy, was bought at the last minute, and production hasn’t caught up. I need a receptacle for the Sweepy 2.0 dust fitting — one option would be to purchase one from Woodcraft, but Carbide 3D sells blocks of HDPE: which looks to be just barely big enough for things to fit. Measuring the hose fitting I get a diameter of ~63.5mm — offsetting that twice we arrive at…

and/or

Adding geometry to cut as a pocket with a finishing pass

One technique which is often suggested to avoid slotting is to add geometry around a part which one wishes to cut out and cut as a pocket down to tab depth — here’s one technique for that. In this case, the project is a bevel gauge which will be cut out of 0.0625" (~1.5mm) thick aluminum: [bevelgauge] Due to the narrowness of the angles, an 0.03125" endmill has to be used, so after importing and scaling the file (we will be cutting out one which is 3") we select the perimeter and offset it tw…

and consider leaving a roughing clearance and taking a finishing pass.

Best Bit for full cut through

One which has a cutting flute length equal to or greater than the thickness of the stock — pretty much any tool should work. Big thing is the toolpaths — if cutting out, rather than just cutting a slot: [image] Offset to the outside by endmill diameter plus 10% or so: [image] [image] [image] Then cut as a pocket: [image] down to tab height or the penultimate pass: [image] then move the contour down to below the pocket and start cutting at the bottom of the pocket: [image] and…

For a belt-drive machine, see:

Measuring belt tension, squaring and calibration

A post about belt tension, how to measure it, what effect it has and why you need to manage belt tension in order to usefully calibrate and square the machine. As usual, no criticism of the machine here, in fact some quite clever design choices seem to have been made. The question of drive belt tension has been bugging me. How much you should have, how to check it and how it affects machine performance. I failed to find any quantitative data to use, so I went and started measuring; and found t…

and I’ve found it helpful to adjust the steps/mm (probably because I’m unable to get equal tension on X and Y), c.f.,

Calibrating the machines over long distances

The typical technique for machine calibration: https://my.carbide3d.com/faq/belt-stretch/ depends on precision measuring tools, and is limited by the reach of the tools in question. EDIT: It also depends on access to the MDI — if using Carbide Motion v6 it will be necessary to enable this in Settings | Options: [image] It should be possible to cut strips from a suitable blank of material, one along each axis — so we set up a square file which matches an available blank of material: [ima…