Looking for some help with the design I’ve attached. I’m trying to V Carve the eagle in it’s present size for a project and don’t have enough room to increase the size. The eagle on top is a V Carve and the one on the bottom is an Advanced V Carve. The problem is when the Shapeoko V goes to cut them it doesn’t go deep enough to show any detail. The first one I cut only made contact with the MDF in a few places, the rest rode right on top of the wood. Everything else that was part of this project came out fine.
Very fine lines require stock which is absolutely uniform in thickness and a machine which has had the MDF surface trammed to be in-plane with machine motion.
It also helps to use a more acute V endmill when cutting fine lines.
For fine lines you need to use a 15/20 degree vee bit. A 60/90 degree bit will barely scratch the surface for fine lines. Be sure not to limit depth when doing a simple vcarve use the bottom of material to get full depth. A simple vcarve goes down the middle of the line until it touches the outside. If you need to limit depth then use advanced vcarve because the vee bit goes around the perimeter and not the middle like a simple vcarve.
See if this is not too much of a change for you. I used a 0.005" inside offset for most of the inner pieces, deleting the original, to give the engraver somewhere to work. The arrow shafts could use some work but the rest show up a bit more
Lester,
Thank you very much, this is perfect for my project. If it’s not too much trouble, could you explain how you changed things to the 0.005 inside offset you stated in your reply.
Guy,
Thank you, I am trying to use a 15 or 20 degree V bit. I noticed very quickly going back and forth to the simulation that anything with a bigger angle wasn’t doing anything. It’s good to know I’m thinking the way I should be with this stuff.
William,
I know MDF is probably the most even across the top and bottom you can find, I double check with an engineered straight edge to be sure and run both sides through my sander to be sure.
I cheated a bit using V-carve pro but the same thing can be done in Carbide create it just takes a bit longer.
Ungroup the elements and select one and then use the offset vectors tool.
Do this over and over until you have “shrunk” the desired elements leaving more space between them for carving. I left the basic outline alone and only adjusted the pieces inside. With V-carve there is an option in their offset tool to delete the original. This combined with selecting large numbers of elements at a time make it a lot faster.
