I don’t understand why stock settings for creating pocket letters does not remove all material? Using 1/4 inch square endmill and it leaves a lot of material between paths that are supposed to be removed causing a lot of unnecessary work. Have you not figured this out or is this all on the user to clean things up? When using a square endmill I shouldn’t see material sticking up between paths that should overlap. My past experience is mostly with CNC mills, lathes, plasma & oxy tables working with metals where removal from machine is last step prior to paint/finish. This woodworking seems to create a lot more errors. I am helping my brother who bought this Shapeoko 5 pro. I guess I expected more hoping we didn’t have to tweak every single process with constant trial and error.
On top of that is there a way to save certain tool path “defaults” so as not to have to change all variables every single time. Example would be setting up a contour with V60 degree bit at varying depths instead of reselecting bit and depth each time.
Upload your file?
Screengrab showing what you mean?
I’m not in front of the machine now and already cleaned & painted piece. When pocketing large letters with 1/4 inch square endmill at 0.125 stepover it doesn’t entirely clean out entire pocket. It will leave out a slim line of material instead of taking an extra pass, leaving a sliver that has to be removed by hand. Will try smaller stepover next time but it seems the toolpath will intentionally leave a gap rather than taking an extra loop to clear everything out.
I remember reading there is a bug in pocket paths in recent CM versions. Usually decreasing the stepover works. @WillAdams usually recommends trying the beta CM to help solve this. But as a work around try decreasing the stepover and see if that helps.
CC in the past has had round-off issues when the stepover divides exactly into the width of the pocket and the diameter of the bit. Try changing the stepover to 0.124".
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