Bits 'n' bobs

But mostly bits…

Can some point me in the direction of where I can find the appropriate settings for Inventable’s colour-coded bits, please?

Thank you.

top left shop menu of the inventables.com site, the second item in that menu is carving bits…

Thank you.

I saw the ‘sales’ page, but is that all the info I need, i.e. shank diameter, cutting diameter, cutting length, overall length, and what it can cut? Don’t I need plunge rate, feed rate and speed, for example?

If you mean for that specific bit, then that is often situational. Sort of like how fast should you drive ona given road, well is it snowing/ icy, dry, sandy? So for a given material those numbers change. Easel has defaults for a given bit/material which are generally very conservative. You can experiment up for your given application.

2 Likes

Thanks for your reply, @HenryFeldman

To be honest, for a complete novice like me, I would like to think a recommended speed/depth of cut for each type of material could be included on the sales website information, and/or a reference table providing guidance.

I understand your analogy, but I think complexity (snowing/ icy, dry, sandy) comes with experience?

Well yes, but we all know the trick of basing it off the software’s recommended settings. Like on the Glowforge if I’ve never lasered a material before I start with the maple-plywood setting and tweak from there. In this case scrap wood is your friend. The built in settings again are designed for maximum safety/highest-success. And look if you push too hard you’ll snap an end-mill (annoying but that’s learning, always have a spare) and if you ruin a piece, it’s good in the beginning to start with things like basic birch ply, pine or MDF, so if you ruin it you run to Home Depot and pick up another sheet. Since easel (and most of the others) have a feed rate override, you can slowly inch up feed rate from the defaults to discover when your bit starts to sound like a beaver caught in a blender (that’s chatter), back off down until it sounds nice and steady. Also if you are getting a lot of tear-out you also are pushing too hard. This is a hobby grade machine so you can’t push like you can on some industrial model with massive horsepower, the flip of that is it’s also not strong enough to destroy itself (you can hold the steppers with your hand) so your machine isn’t going to plow through the end-stops and die. Now will you of course cut right through some clamps, of course you will (so many times!) - that’s partly because easel has no concept of a work holding area which it would avoid like you can designate in Fusion. But you can always make more clamps. I am sure if you search the forum for whatever material you want someone has posted speeds and feeds. So on a machine like this with a program like easel your DOC is shallow as it is a classic pocketing strategy, rather than the newer more modern adaptive strategy (design for full length DOC). Again on some materials like MDF which are easy for the machine to slice through I find Inventable’s defaults way to conservative, but there is no on-the-fly DOC adjustment like there is for feed-rate, so you end up doing a bunch of test cuts. just like with feed if you over do DOC you will most likely get a terrible looking cut as the machine chatters and tears chunks off the bottom of the path. So if you go into easel and select the bit you bought by the color ring it will suggest feeds and speeds for the selected material. Start with that, and decide if you want to change it after a test (generally I cut a circular, rectangular pockets and some text and see if I like that result and guess a correction). On my latest project I probably over did the DOC and I got a lot of screaming from the flutes, but as it was the outside profile that was easy to sand off the splinters, and I just backed down the feed rate to handle it.

That is an incredible lengthy way of going about saying, just use the defaults for each color ring and material in Easel. If they don’t have your exact material, birch ply likely is a good starting point for woods. As a novice the basic woods (ply, mdf, pine) are really your materials to learn on (and can look amazing BTW). @PhillipLunsford’s channel on youtube (Paw Paw’s Workshop) has a lot of great videos on getting started. And you’ll see he gets amazing projects done on basic home depot woods like those. And you’ll see how he goes about picking a speed/feed combo, BTW: you’ll need to look at videos from before his switch from Easel to VCarve pro, but you’ll get lots of ideas, and his style is very laid back and easy to learn from (and use his tape/glue method if you can- once you don’t have clamps around carving is easier and you don’t need to mess with tabs!)

2 Likes

Oh and if you have the Dwealt 611 as your spindle don’t put the speed above the 1 setting (once in a blue moon I will go up to 2, but any high number is going to burn up the brushes (get a spare set of those they were super cheap on amazon because when they wear out, and they do - just like tires, that’s normal then you’re stuck until the new ones arrive). But at 10-speed you’ll burn the brushes in a single long carve versus on 1 the brushes last around 200 hours of running.

1 Like

Thanks, Henry, that was a clear and novice-friendly! Awesome.

To be honest, I’m using Carbide Create on my Shapeoko XXL, so I haven’t really looked at Easel.

I’ll have a close look and see if that software helps me a bit more.

Thanks again.

Does it not have some reasonable defaults? I mean a 2-flute 1/8” end-mill is pretty much the same as any other as far as general speeds and feeds. And then experiment from there.

It does, and you are correct, but I was just getting my head around it.

I suppose I could use the information in Easel to import my tools into Carbide Create - simples :slight_smile: