Trying to cut simple basic shapes

[WillAdams (William Adams (Carbide 3D))]

Please contact us at support@carbide3d.com and we’ll do our best to work through this with you.

[JayGee (Jesse Glessner)]

Try a wood that is NOT as soft as aspen, maybe even Pine as a trial. I tried to mill a bank out of Aspen and it was horrible to work with. You might try that before contacting Carbide just to see if your files work in something else.

[Julien]

At this point I think it’s a mix of things.

• Were all the tests above made from the same stock / piece of wood? Part of this might be inconsistent wood quality too ?. Some soft woods are surprisingly hard to cut well (the downcut helps, but…)

• the 1/8" upcut may be worn out and you got lucky on those interdemediate tests. If you have a loupe you could try and inspect the cutting edges up close. This is what a fresh tool vs dull tool look like under a cheap USB microscope. Also I had a thought: check whether the very tip of the two flutes on that endmill are not chipped : is the tip is chipped, that part of the endmill woud both rip the wood rather than cut it, and would also leave a ridge, like you are seeing. If you have been fighting this for 5 months, I say throw away that 1/8" endmill EVEN if you are not 100% sure it’s bad. Your time is worth much more than a 1/8" tool, obviously.

• can you remind us what cutting parameters you are using at this point ? That latest bad cut pic you posted has me puzzled because not only do you have fuzzies, you also seem to have steps at different depth ? I may be mistake.

[ColdCoffee (Robert)]

My guess is that the material is moving while you cut, maybe not in the X and/or Y axis, but in the Z axis. It is easy to underestimate the amount of lifting force an upcut bit puts on the material.

While this theory would explain why a 1/16 bit didn’t have a problem (regardless of up vs down cut) compared the 1/8th upcut. The theory only works when assuming your 1/4 bit is a downcut bit, so the material didn’t lift.

In a perfect world, Carbide 3D would ask you “are you planning on cutting wood or metal?” when you purchase a machine. If you say “wood” the starter bits would be downcut, and if you say metal the starter bits would be the (current) upcut. I’m sure there are lots of exceptions and reasons why they don’t, but it’s something most of us had to just learn on our own.

[dandangerous (Dan Dornback)]

If you haven’t checked your set screws - it was the major pain point I had as a newbie and I was seeing the exact problem you were showing in the first post.

Pulley set screws - XXL

After dealing with the Y1 pulley set screws backing out numerous times on my XXL and messing up jobs, finally decided to implement regular socket head screws - covered here and other places, but a couple points to add for others with the same problem. The socket head screw size you need is M3 x 8mm, you can get a multi-size box from Amazon for $6 that will be more than enough. You want to use “purple” thread locker, it’s low strength and made for set screws. Several brands out there for ab…

It was deceiving because I checked multiple times and they seemed tight, but it doesn’t take much slippage to translate to a big problem in your cut. Here’s my original post describing the problem:

Shapeoko XXL - final pass is stretched or offset

(Kinda irritated - as a newb I can only load one photo and two links - I’ll try to break my post up to explain…) I’m getting a weird stretch/offset on the last pass of my cuts. I’ve seen this happen in both the X and Y axis now. The best I can explain it is the first 2 cuts are on the path as they should be. The final pass at full depth, it’s like the vector is stretched. You can see in this pic there is a slight lip in the middle of the 5 and larger lip at the bottom. This is on the Y axis. …

Switching to better set screws with a dot of low-strength thread lock is a simple and inexpensive solution to try.

[Alioop (Alisha Camus)]

Hi all, thank you sooo much for all of your thoughts and considerations with regards to my multiple issues. I apologize for the delay of my response, the on button on my laptop fell off (what?!) So I was out of the game until repaired.

But that gave me time to order and receive a 1/8" downcut endmill. Also did an all over screw tightening check and retightened the right pulley strap again (I have the 4 screws fully engaged, dont know how/why it keeps slipping).

All of this combined did make a nice cut, so im gonna close this chapter here. Moving forward, i’ll just keep an eye on all screws/looseness (lock tight is a good idea) and just forget about that dang original endmil and blame everything on him.

Again, really appreciate all of the feedback, I couldn’t have worked through it all without you.
Thank you!