I have been asked to make an U.S. flag with the Army logo on it. I have the design complete, but I have a question I am hoping someone out there with more experience than I can answer. I have attached my file so you can take a look at what I am talking about.
When you look at the top center of the logo you will see there are 13 very small stars. They are contained in an area about 1.09 x 1.25 inches. The depth of cut is set at .1 inches. When I run the simulation it all looks just fine, but I am a bit leary as to how accurate the simulation is. I am fearful that I may wind up with a number of stars so close together at .1 inches that in the end I will have one big hole and a ruined work piece rather than 13 stars. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
I would suggest making a test cut of the stars in a piece of scrap and adjusting as need be.
One thing I have done for this sort of delicate work is to separate out the troublesome details and put them in a separate G-Code file, then cheat the Z-axis higher a bit, cut it, adjust down, and iterate until the cut is made as desired (usually at the height it should have been cut at to begin with).
I have the same basic logo for the stars
302 V 60° Bit, Depth 0.109
0.9175 x 1.001
Everything turned out fine and as Will mentioned it has it’s GCode
Hope that helps.
On my Shapeoko, I do as Will suggests, I start high, and creep down when fleshing out a new logo, font, or vector scale. I program a minimal acceptable final doc, zero to stock top, and run. If this is not satisfactory, I offset the work z incrementally until I have a satisfactory balance of depth and appearance. Moving forward, I adjust the program for the correct offset. Maybe I initially programed for .005", and I arrived at .008", I’ll correct the file for future operations.
My marking work is tiny, and I typically limited to sub .01" final doc. I always use a separate file for such work.
When I am initially coming up with a marking layout, I find it helpful to do a quick sketch of my cutter in CAD. This allows you to easily calculate total WOC for any given DOC. Say you are using a 60 degree, with a perfect point on the end(unlikely, I typically use a .01" tip), you’d have something like a .115" WOC at your mentioned .1" DOC. Draw a circle and drag it around on your vectors.