2nd carve getting things running

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this is my second carve and I wanted to show how I went about it. The pic is coming right off the machine what you see is what it did no clean up. I’m a machinist for a living and after my first carve I decided that with my second carve I would treat it like it was steel that I was citing so what I did was raise the material I was cuting closer to the spindle and shortened up my cuter so it was only sticking out a about .5 of a inch and keep my spindle further up
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I just stacked up scrap wood I had laying around to get it higher up and screwed it down I ran my spindle on 5 can’t remember my feed rate but will post after I look later

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That looks very good for just your second attempt. Looks like you did a great job putting the machine together.

But here are a couple of things I have learned using the X-Carve. Please take it for what any free advice is usually worth.

If you are using the Dewalt then 5 is a much faster RPM than you really want. For cutting wood with most normal bits and endmills keeping the Dewalt on 1 or 2 is about where you will want to be. At setting 1 the Dewalt is spinning at about 16,000 RPM which is near the upper end speed of most dedicated spindles.

I am not sure why you had to stack wood under your material. Is your spindle not able to get any closer to your wastboard? The more pieces you stack up the more chance that the base the work is sitting on is not level and perpendicular to the spindle, which can cause a very uneven depth of cut.

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You are right the more I stack the more chance of it not being flat y I chose to stack it was to suck my bit up and to keep my spindle further up to keep any Deletion to a minimum like I said I’m a machinist for a living and with steel you want a ridged set up and having my bit stick out and my spindle further down the less ridged I becomes the more ridged it is the faster feed rate can be achieved I have been thinking of how I can build a table that I can adjust to keep flat I ran a indicator over my work before I started cuting it was within .01 of flatness so I was fine with it

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You bring up an interesting point I have not considered. Do you think that the design of the Z axis reduces rigidity the lower the spindle mount travels down the screw? I am not a machinist (just an old Nuclear engineer) so I appreciate your thoughts since you have much more experience than I do with this type of equipment.

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I believe It dose I’m not the smartest person in the world but I’ve been making machines make parts for longer then I want to think about. The further down you bring the spindle the more deflection and more chatter you will get the further you can have you tool bit in the spindle the less chatter you will get this is true in steel and wood

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I have always understood that the less stickout you had on the tool the less deflection. But I had never considered where the spindle was on the Z axis. Thank you for teaching me something.

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Give it a try and let me know if it works better like I said that was my 2nd carve and I haven’t had the issues with chatter and deflection like iv read a lot of people have had I would love to hear from some one that’s done more carves then me thinks of it I plane on setting up a test indicator on the spindle and test what deflection I get with the spindle further up and further down

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There have been lots of reports on here that the Dewalt will go through brushes very quickly if you run it at high RPM’s for extended periods. So you may want to go ahead and stock up on spares.

You may want to try dropping your speed down to 2 or under and see for yourself that it works just as well if not better.

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Could see that being a problem. I did do a carve the other day and turned it down to 2 it carved good I felt like there was more clean up but not to much. As for deflection in the z axis there is about .011 when the z is as far down as possible all the way up there is .001-.002 I think it may be due to variation in the z axis track the v wheels ride on

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