How do I remove wood material in the valley when engraving using a 60v bit. I’ve tried adjusting step over, angle and no go. Any ideas. Learning as I go here. Attached photo.
Is pocket clearing enabled?
I use a straight pick. However your debris seems excessive. Cannot tell if this is pine or maple but both tend to be stringy. You will want to pull your vee bit and take a good look at it. There should be a sharp point. If it is rounded over by design or having been chipped off you will get a similar result.
In the past I have carved some plaques for a 2x4 contest and of course it was made of 2x4’s. I used a Groovee Jenny 60 degree bit and got perfect results when vee cutting. If your vee bit is not coming to a sharp point I would recommend this bit.
Here is an example of the Groovee Jenny 60 degree on pine.
Nothing was cleaned and it appears just as it came off the Shapeoko.
Yeah, it’s pine waste board. It’s going on maple so making sure setting are correct. So I just dropped the depth to .200 from 150 and cleaned it up enough to make a difference. It’s a 60 from Carbide and used a few times on a small project.
Wow! That’s a big difference.
Since you are setting a depth, your bit isn’t cutting all the way to the bottom. It’s running around the outside edges, leaving the central area uncleared.
If you are not using a clearing bit, in general you should not limit the depth of your carve.
Set the depth value to ‘t’. This is a special value that means “the thickness of the stock”. Your bit will not actually go this deep, since it is limited by how the bit fits between your vectors.
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You may want to try a 90 degree bit for the ‘Morgan County’ ring and other areas farther from the center. A 90 degree will not go as deep as the 60. In general, I avoid limiting v carve depth within the software for smaller signs, preferring to use larger or smaller v bits for larger and smaller elements. Hard maple should carve much cleaner than pine. Experiment with the pine by carving segments of the design with various v bits and limiting/not limiting depth. Cheers.
Before C3D added the advanced vcarve you could only vcarve. When you do a simple vcarve you should never limit depth. A vcarve will try to touch both sides of lines in the design. If the lines are closer together it cuts shallower and if the lines are further apart the vee bit cuts deeper. You can use the “t” for depth of cut which is a shortcut to cut through to bottom of material. However in a vcarve it will only cut deep enough to touch both sides of the line. The only gotcha is if you have very thin material you can cut through. On a thicker piece of material that wont happen unless your lines are very far a part. I think @mhotchin hit the problem on the head. What I posted earlier can be true if the point of the vee bit is missing but if you limited depth that is what caused the problem most likely.
The super power of this community is getting different perspectives from other people that see problems from a different angle.
To help, I rerun those toolpaths again. It doesn’t always clean them all the way out, but it takes some to a majority of it.
Just to add to the previous posts, when I vcarve text I always create two duplicate toolpaths.
The first toolpath that runs will have a start depth that is about -0.002” less.
The second toolpath will run as designed. This effectively does a clean up of 0.002” which will get most fuzzies.
Most of the time that I do vcarving of text, I’m doing it after masking the whole area, because I’m going to color the text in some way. This is where the downcut V-bit really shines! It makes a really crisp edge to the text.
I use special downcut V-bits. This has been a game changer for my vcarve projects. Like @gdon_2003 above, I’m using the All-American Jenny bits available at Cadence Manufacturing and Design. I use 90, 60 and 30 degree bits.
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