Aztec Star Wars dial

What were your settings on your V60 bit? Thickness on your MDF?

used a 10mm 60* vbit 5mm depth carve 50mm/sec mdf 18mm

Is anyone else having problems with VCarve Desktop not responding when trying to load the SVG file?

Not sure quite what you mean. I have plenty of computing power. I have never had an issue importing files into the application before. Just wanted to see if anyone else was having this issue - thinking it might be the file?

Make sure the bit is sharp I find that mdf will dull v-bits fast.

It’s a lot of vectors is your pc “old” or newer? That big file can lag if you don’t have alot of horse power, I had to give some more ram to my virtual machine on my Mac to get the regular Aztec calendar to load.

I am running Win 10 with 16gb of RAM and Pentium i7. I finally figured out it was the vectors loading. I had never noticed the layer portion of VC Desktop loading layers before trying to import this. After letting it work for a bit it did upload and I am able to work on it. Thank you for pointing out that it had alot of vectors. I have just been used to importing single layer files and converting them.

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I used v carve desktop and loaded the dfx file no problem there.

So for us Americans you are suggesting about .200" DOC. and like 100 IPM. Feed rate. That would save a ton of time. I also thought about clear coating it before I start the cut to give it some strength. Not sure but maybe worth a try. Thanks for the advice.

the best depth setting is at 0.24" on a 3/4" mdf using a 60* v-bit for the entire carving.

its a .DFX not an .SVG, maybe that’s the issue

I’ve have what is probably a stupid question but I am still learning Vcarve and hope someone might be able to help. When I open the dxf file and get it sized as I want, I then setup the toolpaths using the V carve option. My problem is that when it creates the toolpaths it cuts the areas I want left uncut and leaves the areas I want cut. It is carving opposite what it is carving in the pictures above. I have mirrored the image and that seems to work except of course every thing is mirrored.
Attached is a preview pic from V Carve of how it carves originally. I want the dark areas uncarved and the light areas carved.
Hope this all makes sense:confounded:

I know there has to be a simple solution and if anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong it would be greatly appreciated.

When you select the whole image for vcarving, hold down the shift button and click on the outermost ring to deselect it. Rerun your toolpath at that point.

Cool, that worked!! I had actually gotten it right one time and I suppose it was because I hadn’t selected the outer ring( totally by accident). Of course I didn’t save the file cause I was just playing around at the time,:grinning:

Thank you very much!!!

Wow! Great carve and I love the copper effect.

Do mind sharing some more details on your finishing process? Specifically how do you keep the two colours from running into each other without spending a week with a fine tipped paintbrush.

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Question, I thought you couldn’t set a depth of cut, when using the vcarve path in vcarve? How do I go about setting this up in vcarve?

Thanks! Should have known that shellac is the secret sauce.

Has anyone tried one of these calendars in plywood or solid wood, I’m not keen on working with MDF.

Double click the tool path so you can edit it. There is a box that says flat bottom depth. But what you are looking for is where it says what tool you are using. There are two buttons. “Select & Edit” click edit. Then it will pull up the tool library, with the v bit you are using selected. There you can adjust speeds/feeds/step over/ ect… look for DOC or depth of cut or depth per pass. Type in what you want. Click apply click ok.

Wouldn’t that just change the depth the vbit cuts per pass. The overall depth would stay the same wouldn’t it