Cool, I shall do that and then report back. This may take a while. In the meantime I will run this nice (but now thinner) piece of beech through the planer a few times.
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Believe it or not Iām still fiddling with loosening the V wheels. Meanwhile the other half is running the wood through the power planer. Itās much thinner than it was before 
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The other half and I are going the other direction. An Easter weekend of trying to fix various tools (we spent yesterday changing the blade for the planer/thicknesser and rebalancing the band saw) emotionally supported by McDonaldās late at night/early morning has sent us in a very different direction to our poor wood stock.
Ok so Iāve done all of that and Iām still getting chatter. I even tried reducing the cutting depth to 0.04. Somewhat at a loss at this point (itās also almost 11pm) so I think I may call it a night and hope that tomorrow brings inspiration. Any extra advice however would be greatly appreciated.
Check the rest of the v-wheels on Y and Z axis. You might want to re-check the stepper motor power and the potentiometersā¦I know you said you did that, but worth a look.
I shall take a look in the morning and get back to you. Thank you for your help so far and I apologise for my continuing stupid questions.
It is all goodā¦rest well 
Ok so after some investigation weāve discovered that our pots were underpowered. All of those have been tuned in now following the instructions from a rather useful video.
I tried your original suggestion of 80IPM, 14 inch plunge and 0.08 depth per cut. Itās now a lot better but there is still a chatter, especially on the initial first pass.
Any idea if this is something I can tune out or do I need to accept that the first cut may be a bit iffy?
Thanks again for your help.
I found this procedure to be very helpful:
If the first pass has chatter, but the rest are ok, that tells me that your zero of the Z-axis may be off just a hairā¦how are you zeroing your bit?
If your zero procedures are sound, you can ramp in the toolpath.
Also, as @RobertCanning suggested, the bit may be dullā¦the smell of burnt wood that you posted originally was overheating the bit which will dull it very fast.
Weāre currently using the triquetra zeroing block to do out zeroing. Iām beginning to suspect that once again it is a mixture of things. The bit likely did suffer from the scorching from earlier attempts as well as there still being some underlying issue. I will give it another attempt now and see if I get any better results.
The triquetra is very accurate and reliable, so that should be good. The bit is probably dull. Belt tension is about the only thing leftā¦I know some use a scale to measure belt tensionā¦I donātā¦I make sure they are nice and snug and evenly tightened and I have never had a problem.
Hi Eric, weāve given it another go and weāre pretty much back where we started. The cut in general is much better, no more scorching. But weāre still getting chatter but only when cutting from right to left. Adding pressure on the top left of the carriage seems to stop it so I assume that means weāre back to tightening the V wheels again?
Probably not v-wheelsā¦
What type of cut are you doing? Toolpath type? conventional or climb? Still a 2 flute upcut bit? Did you change bits?
Can you post a picture of the latest cut?
Iām doing (trying to do) a roughing pass for a 3D carve. I changed the bit to a fresh .25 inch 2 flute upcut. The cut itself is much better but Iām still getting the chatter. Iāve made a handy video just in case my description is lacking. Hopefully this helps diagnose the problem.
I know some on here will be offended, turn up the router to speed 2 and see if that helps the right to left passesā¦it is common for the bit to struggle going in that orientationā¦you could also run the roughing pass in the Y-Axis direction (with the grain) instead of the X.
Ok so we turned the router up to 2 and this did seem to make some difference. We still have chatter on the right to left cuts but less so. We also discovered that leaning on the table at the front side of the X-carve results in the chatter going away completely. Maybe lowering the cut depth to 0.06 inches will help?
It might helpā¦I was cutting some aluminum this morning and had a bit of chatter on one spot as I was cutting the profile, I just put my finger on the dust boot and put a hair of pressure as it went on that one spot (not the recommended way to do it) especially for a long roughing passā¦beech is tough woodā¦on some really hard red oak I tend to bump up the router speed until the chatter goes away or is so minimal I donāt worry about it. The finishing pass will take care of any roughnessā¦
The cut is coming out pretty smooth now, although ignoring the chatter is a difficult thing to do. Now, any suggestions for what I should set things at for the detail pass? Iāve got a 0.125 inch ball nose that I was intending to use. What sorts of speeds should I be thinking of here?