Doing my first long(ish) carve and am doing a 2 stage carve switching bits in the middle. I’m about halfway through the first carve (1/8" bit) and realized that for whatever reason Easel thought it should do the final cutout of the piece with the smaller of the 2 bits (1/16")
Problem is, my 1/16" bit is only about 3/8" long and the wood I’m cutting is 3/4"
It’s still cutting the larger bit right now, and looking great. My problem is when I put the smaller bit in, it’s going to try to bury itself into the board. Yes I did use tabs, but I’m not sure how that is going to help.
Is my best option that once the first carve is done, abort the cut, then start all over, letting the first bit go through all the motions again?
So my recollection of Easel 2 stage carves is that it treats both carves independently. So, when you complete the first carve, you can change the design so it doesn’t cut out and run the final detail carve. Then, once that is done, setup the cutout line to cut and everything else not to cut and use the bigger bit.
Oh awesome, I will try that, almost done with the first bit.
The issue is it’s a 1/16" bit with probably a 1/8" shaft which means there’s a taper down and he’d be trying to put a 1/8" shaft into a 1/16" groove after the depth of the cutting length is done.
You are correct.
So Justin was right, it treats it as 2 separate carves and allowed me to make changes. That worked great.
I think it depends on the design. I’ve never done 2 stage with a cut out but I’d assume Easel makes no differentiation as to what is what and it may have the detail do the cut out.
Time to experiment!
The problem is Easel’s 2 stage carving is not as smart as you may think.
I just did a simple project: a 4"x 4" square set to pocket and a 5" x 5" square set to outline. Roughing bit was 1/8", detail bit was 1/16". Here are the Easel generated Gcode files.
Untitled_detail.nc (10.4 KB)
Untitled_roughing.nc (41.4 KB)
If you load them up, you’ll see the outer 5" x 5" cut out square is only in the detail file and not the roughing file.
Given how they implemented 2 stage carving, I’m not sure that this is easily fixed.
Well thanks to your help it worked great. I just got my machine running on Sunday, this was only like the 5th thing I had carved and was the first thing over 20 minutes. Total time for this one was just under 4 hours. Roughing pass took 1hr 10min, detail pass took 2hrs 40min, then cutting it out took 13min. I could have pushed the speed on the detail pass, but my it was my first time using that small of a bit and I was nervous so I left it at the easel recommended speed.
For the roughing pass, and final cutout:
1/8" 2 flute Straight cut
45in/min
9in/min plunge
.0625 doc
For the detail pass
1/16" 2 flute upcut spiral fishtail
28in/min
9in/min plunge
.028 doc
Yea I need to get some more bits, right now that 1/8" is the biggest one I have.
