Noob question: what bit to use

[Brucelan (Bruce A Lane)]

I am a total beginner.

I am making a sign for my grand daughter that has her name and an image of a princess on it.

I used a 90 degree v bit for the letters for her name and that part looks great.

I created the princess image using Adobe Illustrator (tracing an image I found on the internet).

It isn’t especially complex but the lines are narrow.

I plan to paint the wooden sign and then sand the surface so that only the cuts show paint.

What tool paths / bits work best for this?

I have attached the c2d file I created.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Saoirse_v1.c2d (308 KB)

bruce

[ehendrix (Eric Hendrix)]

@Brucelan

Any guidance would be appreciated.

I personally for a line vector file I use a 20 deg. V-Bit, a 30 deg. would work but this is what I have on hand. I do a contour cut with no offset at a depth of 0.060.

I use the 20 deg. V-Bit to see the cut lines better since they are a little deeper. a 90 or 60 would have shallower lines.

[gdon_2003 (Guy Donham)]

I recently did a vcarve of a car with very thin lines. I usually use a 60 degree vee bit but on the simulation it was very light. I used a 15 degree vee Foos bit from Amazon. It cut rather deep but it came out good. The thing about a vcarve is the max depth should always set to bottom (t). If you limit depth it can cause issues. The vee bit will only cut as deep as is required for the vee bit to touch both sides of the line. So a 90 or 60 will cut very shallow on fine lines. The text was made with a 60 degree vee bit but the car was a 15 degree vee bit.

This was 11" x 11"

[SDGuy (Anthony)]

For something like this I would use a V-Carve with a 60 degree bit.
I would start the V-Carve at .05 with a max depth of .2 (this doesn’t really matter since it’s just lines).
You can play with the start depth to get the detail/depth you like.

Keep in mind if you carve this in Pine it may come out bad. I recommend sealing the surface with a poly/shellac before carving it to save on fuzzies. If hardwood then it will be fine.
Saoirse_v1 SDguy edit.c2d (340 KB)

There is a small open vector in her hair/collar. I had to fix it.