I received and built my new Shapeoko XXL this week. I’m a design engineer and run my own company so I’m very excited to start machining my own products. I’ve been watching tutorials and reading lots but have a couple of questions…
The first part I’ve tried is a piece of carbon fibre: part should be 420mm long x 39.6mm wide x 0.6mm thick. It’s a part I’ve modelled, so I exported a dxf from SolidWorks, loaded it into Carbide Create and it was waaaay too big. No worries - scale, width 420, the height scaled with the width so we’re done. Created a new tool (Ø6mm flat bottom diamond cut tool for carbon) made a toolpath (outside) then ran the job. The resulting part is 415mm long (measured with a tape) x 39.10mm wide (verniers). What on earth happened?!
Second question: the cutter I have is for carbon and has a completely flat bottom - no cutting flutes at all - so I can’t plunge with it. So ideally (I think) I want a tool path that starts outside the area of my stock at a Z height below the bottom of my stock, proceeds into the material then follows the path as normal. I’m thinking kind of a ‘lead in’. Is this possible, or would I have to add it to the dxf to make it cut this way?
Correct. You’d need to extend the geometry out past the stock, and ensure that the path origin (which is were Carbide Create plunges/enters at) is there.
This morning I added a lead in to the dxf and set the cut to start off the stock at 2mm deep. It worked perfectly, giving a stunningly clean cut!
My theory is operator error: I think the flat bottom cutter was trying to plunge but was unable to… the increased friction caused the X axis to skip a bit.