I was working on a set of coasters yesterday and the advanced vee carve left a little wall of material around everything. In the images you can see a closeup of one and then a pair where I cleaned up with an Xacto knife. It isn’t a big deal but I am trying to make a bunch of these so I don’t want to have to do that cleanup on all of them and I have not experienced this before.
Tools used:
201 for circular pocket
Slim Jen 1/8 for adv vee carve clearing
60 degree Groovee for the vee carve itself.
I ran the vee carve operation twice as advised and increased the DOC from .18 to .19 for the second pass. This may not have been needed, but didn’t have anything to do with the problem since I could see the issue on the first pass.
That wall is not just fuzzies, its pretty firmly rooted. It is not shown in the simulation.
I lowered the stepover on the pocket clearing bit to .062 thinking that this would give me a very small final pass on it, but maybe that was the issue? I guess a pass like that makes no sense in an adv vee carve clearing operation.
Not sure I understand the question correctly but maybe this gets there:
Overall material thickness is .391
Depth of circular pocket is supposed to be .08 but seems to range from .085 to .095.
Depth of the Girl Scout emblem from the circular pocket is .104
Which seems reasonable given:
The height of that wall that is left from the bottom of the emblem is about .06 although somewhat hard to measure. The wall remaining seems to be a consistent distance away from the other surfaces across the entire width 20.5" width.
I did not flatten this board on the machine prior to cutting, but did run it through the planer. This could lead to the minor variation in the DOC on the circles. Too bad my bandsaw is acting up, I had to plane a .75" board down instead of splitting it.
The board is clamped from the sides and held down with 4 strips of XFasten tape.
The only things I can think of are the small stepover for the clearing bit or the slightly bigger depth for the finishing vee carve pass. But like I said, I am 98% certain that wall was there right from the start of the first pass. Makes me wish I had a video of it now to validate.
EDIT:
I just went and measured the flutes on the bit I used for clearing. It shows .124 as a max and that seems consistent with #102. Obviously measuring that cutting surface on a round shaft it iffy.
I was setting up a test job with various scenarios to run in MDF and decided one of the scenarios should be to use #102 instead of the Slim Jenny for the pocket clearing. I noticed the runtime for #102 was greater than the runtime for the Slim Jenny. I messed around with feed rate and didn’t solve it. Then, I checked the definition for the Slim Jenny and saw that the diameter was set to .25. OMG.
I bought several bits from Cadence Mfg at the same time and set them up together using the duplicate tool option. Apparently when I did that one I forgot to fix the diameter from the .25” but I copied from.
I feel stupid. I am running another set now and was brave enough to use more walnut instead of testing in MDF. It should be good. I decided to keep the max depth for the finishing vee cut pass matching the first pass rather than slightly deeper.
Thanks for the help, although there is nothing you could have done to detect this dumb issue.
I do have some calibration results I want to discuss but will either do another thread or send a DM, whichever you prefer.
I piled an ID10T error on top of my PEBKAC.
After finding the diameter issue with the pocket clearing but did not delete / re-add the toolpath. Probably picking a different tool and then picking the intended one again would work as well.
I was thinking that going into the simulation would regenerate the tool paths but I guess not. Is there a better / easier way to force the regeneration without tool switching?
So, second set has the issue I will clean up manually but the third set looks nice right off the tool.
