It's Alive

@sketch42 Thanks, I’ll give it a shot today.

Bumped up the Y-Axis pot a little and tried another v-carve…much smaller this time, a little butterfly.

1/4" v-carve bit, 60 degrees, F100, G20 (inches). Using Universal G-Code Sender. Less than 5 minutes to cut. Seems good…everything measures what it should. More testing :smile:

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Tried another small one…same bit, same speed and feed rates…

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Let’s see that first carve you tried out finally finished, looks very nice!

Recut just the center of the big one from yesterday.
F100 G20 (inches), 1/4" V-bit with 60 degree cutters. Came out nice, would look better in wood.
Might do the whole thing for a lazysusan in walnut. I will try with a 1/8" V-bit, 60 degree to see if the detail looks better.

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A quick relief, the Eye of Horus in 3/4" African Padauk (5 inches in width). I used a 1/8th inch ballnose bit with a feedrate of 50ipm and plunge of 30ipm. Still testing things out. I did this in 1 pass cutting up to 1/4" at a time. A second pass with a 1/16th inch ballnose might clean it up a bit, but a little sandpaper will do wonders.

What is that design you are using? I like it.

It was an “Eye of Horus” black and white image I grabbed off of google…put a cartouche like shape around it. Generated the toolpaths and sent to the machine with UGS.

The eye is well done, but what is the big circular design?

That one is an Aztec Sunstone.

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Erik,

I liked your Aztec design so much I tried to make one myself. I found a line drawing and imported it into Vcarve, vectorized it and then created a toolpath for a 60 deg vbit.

I loaded the gcode into UGS 1.0.7 and everything was going great till UGS just decided to stop sending command (3 hours latter) AHHHHHHH

Here is a time lapse of my attempt. Is there some kind of curse on making one of these?
When I get back home tonight I am going to try to edit the code to remove all the lines that have already been carved and see if I can start it back up where it left off. What could possibly go wrong with that plan?

The curse of the Aztec Sun Stone…good luck with trimming the code and finishing it off…I usually just start over when I get an error like that.

I had UGS stop on me on a couple different ones now, so I am playing with ChiliPeppr now to see if I have better luck. How many lines of G-Code did you end up with, mine was 89k and change…I had a DFX file of the image I got from CNCZone.com and used that. If you like, I can send it to you when I get home from work or I can find the link and send that.

I think this is the thread I got it from:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/machine-created-art/119168-mayan-calendar.html

I think it was in the zip file about 3 posts down in the thread.

The file was about 230k lines of gcode, it carved the first 160k lines before it stopped. So, only another 70K to go. I have edited the file and I feel confident this is going to work great! :wink:

Good luck, please post a pic when you finish I’d love to see it. I plan to cut it in the next day or so, the wife loves it and want a nice one. I found another file: might be good…who knows…

http://lagunacnc.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=37

Bought the Z Axis Tool Setting Touch Plate Probe from Amazon

Hooked it up and tested in Chilipeppr…work beautifully the first time!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UNXXZAG?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s01

Wonder if it’ll work with UGCS…

Well I tried to restart the Aztec file last night after I edited out the portion that had already cut. And it not go as planned (shocking I know). So I guess I will start over this weekend. It started out really well, ran for about two minutes cutting right where it had left off. Then it lost the position and went nuts. The good news is that I was able to set a personal best time for hitting the e-stop! So nothing was damaged.

I wonder if it is possible to have Vcarve generate the gcode in two parts so the file is not so large. Maybe I can select the bottom half of the vectors for one tool path and the top half of the vectors for a second tool path.

Sorry it didn’t work. I’ve had issues with UGS the last few cuts so I switched to Chilipeppr. I like it much better. No issues with the Z Axis touch plate (although I’ve read you can make it work with UGS). I prefer the interface.

Made these to hang under the mailbox. Didn’t want to mess with 2 sided milling yet, so I made two out of half inch pine and I will glue them together, paint and clear coat.

I used a 1/8th inch endmill at 100 ipm, plunge of 30 ipm and did the pocket 0.2 inches deep in 2 passes. It probably would have worked with 1 pass, but who knows. The cutout was with the same bit (I combined the toolpaths into 1 file) and did 4 passes to cut it out leaving tabs (1 on each side). I’ll do a quick sand before I paint.

Very nice! I have not tried a feedrate over 40ipm, did you get much chatter?