I’m a beginner CNC enthusiast that has jump into this new adventure. Just got the machine all set-up and was practicing with some real basic text carving with V-bits.
Running into a bit of an issue were my Z-axis - out of nowhere - will drive straight down into my material and in some cases through my material into the waste board. I’m using all the pre-programmed speeds and feeds and haven’t changed anything. There’s no rime or reason when it does it - sometimes at the beginning of the run cycle and sometimes at the end of a run cycle. I’m using the Carbide Create fonts - no imported fonts.
I have checked the connections - seem fine, have a vacuum attached on a separate plug… Some projects it’s fine, then just went to carve another and just did it again, about a minute into the run cycle. Wanting to add the CNC feature to our business but hesitant as I can’t trust it cut properly. Any ideas? Something that I might be missing? Alot of material being wasted as I can’t salvage anything after it drills a hole in it, not to mention the V-bit tip it broke…
Any help, insight, thoughts would be much appreciated!
Enjoy the day!
I have had this issue before. At first you may think it is the machine, however, in my case after reviewing the initial setup I found the following…
If ever you change the graphics you will need to go into the " Job Setup", the gear icon on the first screen in CC, verify all the numbers are correct. Then I have found to look at all the toolpath information as well.
Wrong input can cause these issues. More times than I care to admit, human error was at fault.
Hello Eric!
Sounds good, thank you for the feedback! I’ll be sure to verify the info in the set-up phase. I do look at the tool paths, and everything seemed fine to me, didn’t see any anomalies there. Went back and looked at the path where it drove down and seemed fine. I’m going to try it again with the info you passed along and see what happens. Clearly I’m missing something!!!
Thanks again for the info, much appreciated!
Now that Carbide Motion has the preview, I do look at that initially.
I have also used Camotics, Basic CNC viewer or NC Viewer after extracting the Gcode from the C2D file and review the animated preview. This is nice to see how the spindle moves when the job runs.
Hey Eric!
Interesting, I’ll have to look at those and see what they do. Not too sure what to look for if is see a bad tool path, but I’ll look into it! Thanks for the info!
I took what you said, went back out to the shop and ran it again. Made sure all the dimensions were correct, redid the tool paths and it all worked!! I manually scrolled back the feed rate by 20% as I was nervous, took longer but worked without any issues!