Quote Originally Posted by amxen View Post
It seemed to not miss any steps it cut very clean and quite fast. The sign was about 10inch long and 5inch tall. It had no problems and took about 20 mins, but I only have the plunge set at 1mm so it took 7 trips to complete the final cut out.
To be honest you haven't really defined if the machine is running correctly because your not actually cutting at correct feed rates. 1mm DOC in MDF is hardly a challenge or test. I suspect that if you tried to cut MDF at the correct feeds/speeds/doc then you may get very differant story.

With a Shallow DOC then you really should be running high feeds rates or very low spindle speeds to give any decent tool life. Your setup 99.99% sure won't run the correct feed rates for 1mm DOC without stalling motors and if you increase DOC then chances are it will struggle if it's still not setup correctly. Spindle speeds are about the only thing your in control of and this alone isn't enough.

With MDF then you should be able to cut much deeper and still maintain decent feedrate even with these types of machine. Minimum DOC should be 50% tool diameter and 100% + is common in MDF with carbide tooling. Can't say on feed as don't know what you cut this at but I suspect it will be well short of what it should be.? Minimum feed in MDF would be 2000mm/min and thats with lot deeper DOC IE: 3mm cutter = 6mm or more.!

So just because your cutting doesn't mean the machines working OK. Tool life is something you need to consider and cutting like this will drasticly shorten tool life, esp in MDF. Sharpness of the tool greatly affects finish quality so you very quickly lose finish quality when cutting with wrong feeds/speeds/DOC so it really does pay to spend some time and set the machine up correctly.