Just curious what others do for very long carves 16+ hours, do you let it run over night unattended or do you stop it somehow in the middle and restart it the next day? I would love to find a way to break up some of these finishing fine 3D toolpaths.
Thanks in advice
Do not let the machine run overnight (says the guy who has been by the side of his machine until 4AM and then crashed w/ two alarm clocks to get up for work that morning).
Break up long projects into manageable sections.
Optimize feeds, speeds, tooling, &c. so as to reduce time.
What program are you using to create the 3DCarves ?
I process a subset of the depth ( some z depth range) at a time to break up the runs in Fusion.
How would you go about breaking up a 3D carve that is say 25" x 25" and you’re doing the finishing toolpath. I’ve tried to break it up in sections but that only leaves uneven finish when it stops and starts.
I use VCarve Pro with the 5 Pro 4x4
I have a wifi camera that I can watch and listen to the machine from inside my home.
It has pan tilt zoom $20 on amazon. my vfd spindle never gets hot
I am using the adaptive clearing. I have not tried the Parallel technique that CC uses.
My “seams” show up at the major step down heights, not the XY axis.
I have had to balance DOC between, the tool and what the material will handle in Shear when the minor steps are cut ( too much DOC and the peaks break off before cutting).
I used to leave things on overnight but it makes me too uncomfortable the older I get-- weird how that works.
Now I kick off things while I’m in my slippers in the morning. I’ve got a cam on it and throw it on the tv or in the computer and check on it physically periodically. 3D carves can be some long work, especially if it’s big.
Disclaimer-- Your milage, requirements, safety systems and tolerances to safety risks–and anything else–is yours to make.
Two possible strategies:
What material are you cutting with what tool?
A 25" x 25" tool w/ a DEFAULT #102 is 505 minutes or so for a 3D Finishing toolpath — a #101 in hardwood reduces that to 224 minutes and a #111 gets back up to 576 minutes — and the hardwood feeds are quite conservative — should be able to get that latter down quite a bit.
Does your design geometry allow for a tapered ball nose? Such tooling can be pushed much harder/faster.
You should never leave a CNC unattended. Long jobs can be split up by running the tool paths and when you are too tired to go on just pause and shut down. Then go into the Carbide and disable the tool paths that have already run and when you get ready to start up again just load the file and it will pick up where you left off. If the single tool path is too long then all you can do is tough it out or run it when you have the time to baby sit the machine.
Here is the reason you dont leave a CNC unattended.
I just looked at the VCarve site. They have an option called Cut3D.
That has an option for thick models that allows for “Z Clipping”.
You could change the Z range, but not the stock.
The tool path uses the Parallel toolpath technique.
I try to “Pause” the machine when it has lifted from the work, then I turn off my motor. Reverse that in the morning when I start back up.
I use walnut, cherry mainly and I have the Carbide 65mm VFD air cooled Spindle. I think I’m going to upgrade to the 80mm water cooled spindle soon so I can use 1/2" shank endmills and cut faster. So I will be selling the air cooled spindle soon.
So must leave the machine and your pc on all night? I have the spindle so that make it harder to turn off then back on in the morning. I did find this which video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyZdXAcIins which I will try on my next carve.
Please do not leave the machine unnecessarily pause — stepper motors are weird and work their hardest when holding position.
No kidding… TIL. 20 chars.
Yes, I “lock” my PC which turns off the screen and I turn off the VFD spindle. Unless the power goes out in the shop, I find I do not have to re zero my coordinates which introduces the potential for error. I just wake up my computer and turn the spindle back on before resuming the job.
Pause is a wonderful thing but if you pause for a short amount of time everything is good. If you pause for 8 hours or more that can lead to premature failure of your stepper motors. It is not really premature but a stepper motor has a mean time between failure (MTBF) and on average an electrical device is rated by MTBF. I do not know what that rating is for the C3d stepper motors but all that time spent locked and on counts to the total number of hours the motor is on and the MTBF clock is ticking. Plus the “Paused” stepper motor is the maximum amount of current through the stepper motor to just sit there and do nothing.
So if you did that once a year well it is not good but is not going to ruin your stepper motor but repeated and continious pausing will lead to a failure of your stepper motor/ stepper motor driver on the control board and cascades on down the line to the power supply of the controller.
The best thing you can do is to break up a long job into smaller bites. Those smaller bites would be the time you can be available to supervise the running of your machine that would work for your schedule.
Never leave your machine unattended. It can lead to disaster. If you did not see this above look again.
Yesterday I had my Ridgid shop vac start to fail on me about 20 minutes into a job. The job was an hour long and I usually let it run and I’ll step away to check on the kids, work on setting up another job or work on something else in the garage. I’ll poke in and out of the shop every 5 minutes or so to make sure all is well. When I was on my way out there to check on it, I heard a grumbling noise that didn’t sound familiar and when I got to the machine, I smelled some burning. I hit the pause button and shut off the router to try and make sense of the the noise and sure enough the shop vac motor was getting hot and was spewing metal dust out the side of the motor. Must have cooked the bearings and now the stator/rotor is rubbing. Could have easily been a fire if I wasn’t paying attention.
I’ve got several other instances where I’ve broken bits, forgot to clamp in material, crashed into something and the machine lost steps, etc. Definitely not worth leaving unattended even if you think your stuff is bulletproof reliable.
Now I have to go buy a new shop vac. Probably get that new Dewalt Stealthsonic.