The image is of leaf veins that will be around 2" total size (very small).
What I want is a light carving with fine detail and very little depth.
The issue I’m having with vcarve is it has to go very deep in the thicker areas to have any effect at all on the thinner areas. If I try to just have to make a light pass the thinner areas don’t get carved at all. If I try to do an engraving it seems to make patterns which I don’t want.
It maybe a z-axis issue, bitsetter screwing up my numbers or something. Not sure.
Just curious about how you guys would approach this carve. Ideally I’d like the cutter to just make a single pass down each line raising or lower based on the thickness of the line.
So this is what you get with just a normal, full depth V Carve. I scaled the design until it was 2" tall. I added a small circle that is about 1mm across for scale.
It is a little difficult to imagine how the bit works. The depth of the cut is exactly proportional to the width of the vector lines. The wider the vector lines are apart, the deeper the bit has to go to fill in the gap between the two vector lines. You can’t get “very little depth” with “thicker areas” unless you use a bit with a very wide angle which then would give almost no depth on the thinner areas. I remember having to think this through myself.
Your deepest spots will be the intersections (red circles), (about 0.054" in this example)
For the 60° to achieve this, it needs to go about 0.046" deep
For a 30°, it can go 0.100" deep
