So it’s been a while since I’ve been on here and everything has been moving along well…until tonight. I have a piece of mdf/laminate flooring (approx .31 inches thick) that i was using VCarve on (60degree VEE and 1/8 inch flat) . i did a test with used the VCarve function on an 8x12 piece and everything looked great (disregard the crap painting job i was playing with)
then moved on to the actual project, the dimensions were 30.5x5 so the image was shrunk down accordingly. everything was going along fine and then in the last 15 minutes of a 2 hour project it started drilling little holes (with the VEE bit)
Clearly i did something wrong or didnt account for something.
the original text i made in photoshop and saved off as an SVG (like all my other projects)
Obviously the holes arent random, they’re trying to do something but i want to avoid a heartbreak like this again in the future. It came out “decent” but I was hoping for better.
Any suggestions are welcome
What endmill are you using. I looks like you may have lost X position. Any chance you crashed at some point?
Those marks should’ve been creating sharp corners for you, but they all look shifted to the right. The corners on the left side of the letters occurred inside the letter, while the ones on the right sides were in uncarved areas.
I think Neil nailed it (he usually does), it does look like you lost X steps somewhere between the beginning on the job that removed the bulk of the material, and the final moves that come and make the round corners pointy. You may have hit the left travel limit/bumpers, or it may have happened without any crash but with a pulley slipping/skipping a tiny bit. If you rerun this and things go bad again, try and check your X/Y/Z zero after the job, to see if it has shifted.
I suspect what happened is your machine lost Z position, which then resulted in lost X.
Inspect your motor wiring and connectors.
If you don’t find anything obvious to address, please take photos of your Z-axis wiring, including the connectors, including at the controller and send them in to support@carbide3d.com
I was thinking something similar. Maybe the bit came loose, slid out of the collet a bit, and got hung up on the workpiece. That would account for the Z becoming deeper and the reasoning for the X losing steps.
I think we’d see more damage in the left corners if Z position was lost.
I don’t see anything in the gcode that would cause a crash.
Check all the connections for your X stepper.
He could confirm it for us. I was thinking his Z got screwed up or his bit came loose because the holes at the corners look deeper than all the other letters. Maybe its just the lighting and angle of the photo that made it look that way.
well, i’m 50 and the cheater glasses can only help so much but i dont think the holes are really any deeper. they do have a teardrop shape which might be important.
That’s expected as the roundest post of the teardrop would’ve been inside the previously carved portion of the letter.
This might be one of those things that you won’t know what happened until it happens again with you watching.
I’d move the machine around, especially long movements on the X (at different Y positions) and really watch for any areas it might have an issue.
If this was an older Shapeoko 3, I’d tell you to check the wiring again because I would know that’s the cause. On a pro, it’s not nearly as likely, but still possible that you have a loose connector or bad crimp.
gotcha, and @WillAdams i’ll keep an eye on how much my endmill is sticking out. i try for about a 1/8-1/4 inch of smooth between the collet and the flutes.
so last point on this, i was about to start another project and took a closer look at my 60 VEE. could this be the cause or perhaps just another victim. either way it looks like an arrowhead i dug up so im figuring its toast. ***i make no changes to RPM, feedrate, etc
again, i was using mdf and in one of my earlier tests there were sparks and my Z position somehow was way too low. i reset everything and started from scratch and thats when i ended up with this whole issue
That laminate flooring is probably coated with aluminum oxide to make it wear longer. It’s also called ruby or sapphire with the right impurities and crushed to make sandpaper. I got some of those 25 cent samples after a recommendation to use them for practice, and chipped a couple bits on them. Looks like you’ve done the same.
wow, never would have even thought of that