Pocket Signage

In creating this sign I used these settings and all seemed fine however for the chatter and visible lines. The chatter was somewhat remedied by doing the usual techniques of belts, v wheels, tighting bolts , etc. I changed the settings by slowing down the feed rate to 60 ipm from 80. This still didn’t seem to help all that much with the x axis.

The pocket on the sign is leaving lines. The pocket is done in 2 passes with a final pass as shown in the attached picture.

Can you post a picture of the cut?

One thing I would do is increase to 2 passes the cut with the 0.125" ball endmill.

oops forgot the main one

How much cutting have you done? It looks like your spindle is not square to the wasteboard…it might have a slight tip from front to back.

Ball nose for for final clean up of letters. Well at least that was the plan. Did I not plan well?

I have about 150-175 hrs total but this is the first of pocket work.

I would check that the z-axis is square to the wasteboard or there is not up/down play in the axis.

The smaller bit for pocket cleanup is used to get into tight corners, so a smaller endmill is best, not a ballnose.

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@ErikJenkins ok I’ll take a look later tonight, and give an update.

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I checked the z axis and found it off by 1/16th give or take, I also noticed some movement in the axis. The movement looks as thought the wheels ie. x carriage is not tight against the rails.

I do find at certain pocketing or thru cut if the x maker slide is too high and the bit is fully seated in the router the lower wheels physically slide off the rail causing the whole assembly to shift and leave chatter and bad surface marking.

Just adjusted the maker slide to be 90 degrees to table in both directions. Trying another cut tomorrow and post outcome.

I would also suggest lowering your plunge rate. I have mine typically around 10-15 in/min, but that might be a bit conservative.

Fixed the maker slide issue with all the wheels. I ended up retighting them with blue lock tight and made the proper adjustments, all is secure. I did a another trial run and it helped but not cured.

I did a check of the levelness of the table and found it lower on the right side of the table. Thinking I might add a sacrificial waste board and flatten this out .

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What is the resolution going to do?

If it helps, I addressed the issue of squaring the spindle to the wasteboard in my video on making a secondary wasteboard. It’s in this thread: X-Carve Maintenance/Troubleshooting Videos - Add Your Own! - #8 by RobertA_Rieke

Are you saying the screen resolution affects the quality of the cut?

I really appreciate your time and effort in these videos. From the beginning of my purchase they have come in great use. Thanks again and I’ll check it out tonight.

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I’m always glad to hear they’re making a difference. If it helps, I’m trying to do a series of quickie videos every couple weeks to address random things related to the X-Carve. The video coming out tomorrow at noon (mountain time) is going to show how I went from SketchUp to SVG to Easel. :smile:

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Yes it is. That only changes the screen resolution. It makes no difference to the generated tool path.