My CNC Arrived

[handi]

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of my book! 


https://www.woodcademy.com/book-store-1/...ng-in-wood

[jteneyck]

What I think of as I consider adding CNC to my shop...

Don’t forget to pick up a copy of my book! 


https://www.woodcademy.com/book-store-1/...ng-in-wood

Thanks; I'll take a look.

John

[jeffss]

Got mine early. Went with the Woodworker. Only took 4 weeks. Had to clear up space and run some dust collection. Ready to flatten the spoil board and cut a grid and holes. Fingers crossed!

[jteneyck]

Got mine early. Went with the Woodworker. Only took 4 weeks. Had to clear up space and run some dust collection. Ready to flatten the spoil board and cut a grid and holes. Fingers crossed!

That looks way too organized.  Nice.  Flattening the spoilboard is actually pretty hard because you are working at the limits of X - Y travel.  I ended up using a pocket toolpath, followed by doing the outer perimeter manually.  

I took 0.005" passes, checked to see if the spoilboard was flat everywhere, then ran the program again if it wasn't.  I ended up taking off about 0.030" total.  Each pass took several hours on my Journeyman because I was being very conservative.  Vacumm or DC is really important to keeping the dust under control.  

Good luck.  

John

[Lumber Yard®]

Got mine early. Went with the Woodworker. Only took 4 weeks. Had to clear up space and run some dust collection. Ready to flatten the spoil board and cut a grid and holes. Fingers crossed!

Sweet. I'm glad to see some of you guys getting into the CNC world. I'll be interested to hear how your machines perform as time goes by and you become more familiar with them. They look like they are a decent build so I'm sure they will do fine if you are using reasonable settings. Anyhow, have fun and keep posting updates. WN could use some more machinery and woodworking posts. 

[jteneyck]

While waiting for a router bit to arrive to work on another project, also CNC related and more to follow on that, I made this map of the world on a piece of birch plywood.  There are a lot more little islands out there than I ever knew of.  Anyway, I sealed the plywood with a couple of coats of WB topcoat, did the carving, and then wiped on a walnut gel stain, working it into the routed areas and wiping it off really well.  



This took about 2-1/2 hours to carve.  The carved area is 20 x 12".  Nothing spectacular but another small skill building project.  

John

[Lumber Yard®]

2-1/2 hours? What is your cutting feedrate and rapid speed?

[jteneyck]

2-1/2 hours? What is your cutting feedrate and rapid speed?

I used the defaults for the 1/4" - 60 deg V-bit.  70 inches/min feedrate and 100 mm/sec rapid speed.  Curiously, the estimated time in V-Carve Pro was 37 min, but when I loaded the file into the 1F controller it came up with nearly 2-1/2 hours.  I have no clue why.  Any thoughts? 

John

[Lumber Yard®]

I used the defaults for the 1/4" - 60 deg V-bit.  70 inches/min feedrate and 100 mm/sec rapid speed.  Curiously, the estimated time in V-Carve Pro was 37 min, but when I loaded the file into the 1F controller it came up with nearly 2-1/2 hours.  I have no clue why.  Any thoughts? 

John

The Vcarve estimate sounds correct to me. When you posted the dimensions I was guessing 30 minutes for a simple vcarve like that in that size. The feedrate and rapid speeds sound decent to me for your machine and would align with the Vcarve cut time estimate... so, is it possible that the controller is throttled down to some percentage of the gcode feedrate? I know in Mach 3 I can throttle things down or speed things up if I want to from the standard 100% gcode speeds. Other than that your plunge rates and z-height would be calculated into the Vcarve estimate so, I don't think those would be problematic.

Again, my guess is that it is something post Vcarve and that leaves your controller /post processor. 
I'm probably not going to be much help as I probably won't be familiar with anything but Mach 3 which I doubt you are using.

[jteneyck]

The Vcarve estimate sounds correct to me. When you posted the dimensions I was guessing 30 minutes for a simple vcarve like that in that size. The feedrate and rapid speeds sound decent to me for your machine and would align with the Vcarve cut time estimate... so, is it possible that the controller is throttled down to some percentage of the gcode feedrate? I know in Mach 3 I can throttle things down or speed things up if I want to from the standard 100% gcode speeds. Other than that your plunge rates and z-height would be calculated into the Vcarve estimate so, I don't think those would be problematic.

Again, my guess is that it is something post Vcarve and that leaves your controller /post processor. 
I'm probably not going to be much help as I probably won't be familiar with anything but Mach 3 which I doubt you are using.

Thanks.  1F uses their own controller based on Raspberry Pi.  Not high end but it seems to work well so far.  The estimates between VCarve and actual cut times on the controller have been very close for profile, pocket, and even 3D toolpaths.  This is the first time I've run a vcarve toolpath, however.  I haven't changed anything in the controller.  If it's been throttled down it came that way from 1F and seems to be associated only with the vcarve toolpath.  I'll have to ask on the 1F users forum on FB to see if others have any ideas/advice.  Thanks again.  

John