I went to cut some 1/8” MaxMetal the other day and had the design done in Vcarve. I used the normal Carbide Inch post processor in the software. When I opened it in CM it said I was going to be cutting .13” below program zero. I was configured to zero on the surface
The thickness value there is thicker than my material. I have had the bitsetter disabled for a while while messing with the stingray and the shark tooth but I re-enabled it for this and then turned the machine on/off multiple times as well as restarted CM multiple times and the weird numbers persisted.
So I copied the vectors into CC and remade the toolpaths. Then when I loaded into CM the size parameters are correct.
I decided to try the cut anyway and it went through both layers of the blue tape but the spoilboard was unscathed.
I plan to do a test just passing a 12x12 material from Vcarve into CM and seeing what it does. Unfortunately I am out of town for a week. Has anyone else seen this discrepancy?
One is stock size, which I think it gets from the CC toolpath in the comments at the top.
The other says “Program Size” from your Vcarve program, which probably doesn’t have those comments.
So the dimensions are of the toolpath, not the stock. So the Z 0.93 should be your 0.13 depth plus 0.8 retract height. And unless the program cuts all around the stock, it could be smaller in XY.
Oh, ok. So .13 below program zero is normal in this case then since my zero was at the top of the .125 stock and my cut depth was .126. I wanted to make sure I didn’t have an onion skin on that bottom metal sheet.
So I should have let it roll. I was doing a test and didn’t have material I wanted to waste. I must admit I don’t normally look that closely at the screen but I did get a popup similar to the one I showed on the CC job but with larger values.
I am not sure how CM was calculating the bottom of the machine for that message. It didn’t even mar the spoilboard which still has plenty of thickness before hitting the T tracks.
