First engraving test :)

[Davek0974]

Yes, i always probe with the actual tool.

I tried cutting the Illustrator file tonight, yes it cut far smoother but it was generated as two paths which gave me a letter with an inverted V in the middle ;)

A settings issue, wrong font, wrong code generator, other problem?

Lots to learn here...

[Boyan Silyavski]

I think Vectric Aspire / V carve/ beats all when we are speaking about signs and engraving

[Davek0974]

Blooming expensive though :(

[Boyan Silyavski]

what are you using now?

[Davek0974]

My CNC world consists of CAD - either Deltacad or Illustrator, CAM - SheetCam, CNC - Mach3

Apart from some free programs that i downloaded for messing about with that's about it.

Vectric V-Carve was about £400 I think - a lot of cash for something that is unlikely to bring cash in via sales I think.

[Clive S]

My CNC world consists of CAD - either Deltacad or Illustrator, CAM - SheetCam, CNC - Mach3

Apart from some free programs that i downloaded for messing about with that's about it.

Vectric V-Carve was about £400 I think - a lot of cash for something that is unlikely to bring cash in via sales I think.

Yes but you can use it to import dxf files and cam them with it.

[Davek0974]

Following assistance from John S (thanks John) I have done some more engraving, this time using code generated in V-Carve and using my 3mm 30deg 0.2mm carbide cutters, the results were mind-blowing - razor sharp lettering, no burrs on the edges, could not be better and proves the machine is totally capable of detail work...



It was not without issue though as I am 99% certain that the first plunge took the ridiculously fine tip off the tool as the first pass at Z-0.25 was air-cutting, pretty certain i could see the tip come off as i was watching pretty closely. The cuts above were done after this though so the results didn't suffer, maybe too fast a plunge rate?

So, in the last few days I now have a working setup of Vectric, nice software it seems, still reading the manual ;) It is intuitive though and have got a test text file I was messing with, setup some tools, hopefully using the same settings extracted from Johns' file but this time using a 3mm 60deg carbide bit as this angle seems the most common?

The results were nowhere near as good and I was bit disappointed with them - there are burrs on the edges and the cuts are generally crap under a magnifying glass looking like they were hacked out with a machete ;)



So, obviously lots to learn here, any pointers???