I have 16” diameter piece of wood I want to carve on and I am new to the x carve and am wondering how i would go about that on easel. Thank you in advance!
Set your x,y 0 position in the center of the circle. That way your project will definitely be centered
1 Like
yes, i love this trick. saw it in one of your videos. great channel for x carve projects.
Whenever I do circular milling I do my work holding using a bounding-square, so draw a square around the circle and those 2 L-brackets will center the circle between them. Or you can make soft jaws to hold your circle. Unlike on a metal milling machine these can just be plywood half circle cutouts that will hold the circular part in the middle with some clearance so you can tighten them down (without a slot between them it won’t tighten. The advantage of the soft jaw technique is you can hold any shape you want (shaped like an splat-mark? no problem)
Here are soft jaws on my machinist vice and a piece of round bar 6061 that I would hold it it. I also have a chuck on the 4th axis but sometimes you just want regular 3-axis milling. I have for various projects milled the pocket down that entire face (I was machining 2" napkin rings which were engraved so needed to hold a circle with a specific part vertical so the profile of the ring was milled all the way down the jaw). In general with soft jaws if you can have an index mark in your profile to assure the stock is repeatable in some way.
Following Phil’s suggestion, make sure to reposition the design to have its center at (0, 0) prior to initiating the carve. The design will not show on -X or -Y on the screen, but it will carve perfectly fine if the X, Y is Zeroed on the center of your circular piece. There are many ways to find the center of the circular piece just search the forum (one I have posted to recently as well).
Other than that, you can place the circular piece up against a bump stop in the front left corner, zero to that corner, and have the design Left & Bottom at (0, 0).
{:0)
Brandon Parker
In the future leave the wood square, vcarve then cut work out with tabs. If wood is already round the draw circle diameter of wood. Put in vcarve and only make tool path for vcarve.