First engraving test :)

[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???

[Boyan Silyavski]

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?

Great!

Its a common problem- about the tip i mean. I am extremely conservative with the plunge rate of V cutters, even in wood.

[Davek0974]

Bit better today, dropped the feedrate to 500 and plunge to 150, this was the same file - new one on top, yesterdays' one below - a much better result but still a tiny burr on a couple of the verticals.



15mm high 'T' this time with a flat-plane limit set of 2mm so it bottoms out. Came out very nicely i think, picture does not do it justice, iPhones suck at macro work ;)

[Boyan Silyavski]

That T is great! i forgot, do you use mist cooling?

[Davek0974]

Yep, its a home-build minimal quantity coolant system - I'm running on paraffin/oil at about 95% paraffin, I put 500ml in the tank when i built it and its only gone down about 200ml so far and i've done quite a lot of cutting and messing about ;)

You can just about see the film on the metal when cutting, I turn it up a little for deep cuts.