if i am doing a carve and i hit the pause button can i change like cut depth and hit unpause or do i have to start back over at the begining of the pattern?
I don’t know about the pause button (sure would be nice) but I had to stop a carve today. The machine went back to the home position, I edited the drawing, clicked carve and away it went. It redoes the path that it already did but it was only 5 min into the carve so it wasn’t an issue for me.
My last one would of been 45 min of air cutting why I was asking. I just stopped and deleted the parts that were done and changed the depth for the outline and moved on to finish after resetting home position. My s witch’s don’t work (not a big issue and will look into it another day.)
I had to do that to a job the other day. The one issue I found was when it raised up and moved the spindle across the whole surface it wasn’t high enough and nicked my work. It was just some stuff for the kids so not a big deal but something to watch for. I should have looked at the tool path before hand and I would have noticed this.
I did find the home position seemed to be high when it returned. I just dropped the Z to where it should be and things worked well for me. I didn’t know about the safety height setting, I’ll have to look into that. The bit hit the work because I had the lowest Z point pretty low in the drawing and didn’t want to wait that long for it to finish. I stopped the carve, flushed up all of the other shapes, set the lowest Z higher and zeroed where the previous lowest point was. It saved about an hour of milling the air. My kid wanted to see the carve before he went to bed. Hope that all makes sense. Pretty happy for the first carve though.
When the machine returns home after completing a project or if you stop a project mid-cut, it comes to x0,y0,z(safetyheight). So if you have your safety height set to .5", the machine will return to x0 y0 z0.5.
It does remember where you set your original z0 point though, so if you have to restart a cut as long as you select “Use Last Home Position” instead of “Confirm Home Position” (use the little grey button instead of the big green one) it will start from it’s original zero position regardless of where you move the Z axis.
A protip here: Many of the newer bits Inventables sells, as well as some other ebay vendors, have collars on them. Check to make sure, but I’ve found that on 1/16" and 1/32" bits, the collars are all the same distance away from the end of the bit. This means that if you’re doing a 2-stage cut you can raise the Z axis to change the bit inbetween stages and you don’t have to rezero the machine. Once the new bit is chucked in, you can start the machine and it will automatically lower down to the safety height before moving to the start of the carve.
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