My search-fu is usually pretty good but I can’t find this one so apologies if someone has covered it already.
I just ran some material through my bandsaw to do a resaw to get it down to a workable size and I’d like to try and do a v-carve on it. I would like to run a ‘flattening job’ before doing the vcarve bit. Does carbide create reference that new height or do I need to offset my v-carve start by the amount that I took off in the flattening job?
Example: I have a .5" board. I want to take off .04" just to ensure flatness. I want my vcarve to be .2" deep. Do I set my start depth at 0 or do I set it at .04"? I assume that it will always reference the zero that I established with the BitZero?
I do a flattening job by marking the surface w/ a pencil squiggle, running a surfacing operation from what seems to be the high point in terms of Z, making a single pass — if it doesn’t take everything down to flat, I jog down by the depth of the surfacing pass, set zero there, and repeat until all the marks are gone and everything is flat. I then jog down by the depth of the surfacing pass and set zero there.
Recommend making the surfacing pass depth a multiple of the 1/40th of a mm which Carbide Motion is able to jog the machine if using a belt drive, of the 1/200th for a Z-Plus, &c.
I think you need to make two different projects. The first is the flattening and the second would be the vcarving. To start the flattening pick a spot and zero. With the pencil squiggles on the material start the job and let it complete. If you have any pencil lines left jog to that area and zero again and run your flattening job again. I use a Whiteside 6210 1 inch fly cutter to level my spoil board and to flatten a board if required. I have it set up as a custom tool with 0.010 inch doc of cut. So when I set up the pocket I only cut the pocket depth to 0.010 and it will only make one pass and stop. If the pencil lines are still there rezero and run the job again until all the pencil lines are done. This method would remove the minimal amount of material until you get it flat.
To start the vcarving project zero on the newly flattened board.
Good ideas on the flattening for sure. I feel like treating them as completely different jobs would require me to re-zero it though?
I might not be asking the question right since it’s a bit confusing for me to figure out.
From what the tutorials have shown apparently doing a .1" starting depth and .2" max depth is the huckleberry with the 60 degree v-bit. I take some material off with a pocket pass, let’s just say I take off .0125" and the board is nice and flat. Do I change my starting depth to .1125" or do I leave it at .1"?
Also, if I don’t want to hog out the material on such an aggressive starting depth (I’m using oak and walnut) would I be better off taking something like .09" off with a pocket job or should I surface first, then offset my Z by +.9" so it’s using .01 below the fresh surface? Does seem a bit wasteful and time consuming to mill down an extra .1" for no real reason.