I’m making a couple dinosaur heads out of mahogany. I sliced the model into 1.5" slabs, laid them out on some mahogany and started the roughing pass. It doesn’t sound great to me. I wonder if some more experienced X-carvers can weigh in here?
1/4" bit
75IPM
0.125 DOC
Mahogany
Am I going too fast? Too deep?
Should I go faster and shallower?
I made a push stick last week out of mahogany I used the walnut setting in easel and it ran great
That’s probably a little aggressive. Try 60ipm and .1" and see how the machine sounds. What speed is your router running?
Nice. The Easel default speed for walnut is 32 IPM. That would take this cut from 2:41 to 5:34. Trying to figure out the best balance between speed and quality… Might have erred on the speed side of the scale this time.`
I started at speed 1 and adjusted up to 3 to try to smooth things out a bit.
you should be able to run on 1. It’s 16k rpm. The faster you run that router, the faster you will be replacing the brushes. I tend to go with a shallower cut and faster ipm. I’d be comfortable running that at .063 doc and 80 ipm.
It really comes down to how the machine is running. Even tightness of grain from one piece to another can throw things off a bit.
JDM, I’ll have to try faster and shallower next time. I think you’re onto something there.
I wonder if I could have generated better tool paths? It seemed like the 3D roughing path from Aspire had the bit fully surrounded by material quite often. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me…?
Now - in no way is this a negative, I would first say awesome and ambitious - secondly Mahogany - very dense and hard slower better - Now the meat of the comment - I would of pre tested on laminated MDF on something like this for cost effectiveness alone. Once you got a positive result if MDF was not to your liking then Mahogany could of been used.
Good thoughts PWAC, not taken negatively at all, no worries.
I’ve done lots of cuts on MDF and other materials. I needed to work with mahogany to get some actual numbers for carving mahogany. I’ve cut this dino head in foam and other materials before… lots of testing.
Well the cut finished successfully. Edges are a little fuzzy. I think that’s due to a cheap, dull chinese carbide upcut bit mostly. X-Carve returned to exactly the physical zero position it started in (ie no lost steps). So, looks like the X-Carve handled the cut well. I think a bit upgrade may work wonders here and still allow me to run at decent speeds with good results.
I think part of the noisy cut is due to the length of bit too. Is that called runout? Whatever it is, makes sense that the longer the bit is, the more it will wobble at the cutting end.
For the next one;
-Slow down to 60 IPM
-Lessen DOC to 0.1 inch
-DeWalt on speed 1
Can anyone recommend a starting point for my finishing pass? I’ll be using a 1/8" ballnose.
Aspire. I’m open to learning new software though. Can you recommend a package that’s more suited for 3D work?
I’m a CG artist and animator by day so I pick these programes up fairly quickly.
As far as I know I would let the machine automatically run with the finishing pass generated in Aspire. I would get some tapered ball nose bits from Toolstoday they cost a lot more than a Chinese Carbide but the TN coated 4 flute have worked awesome for me even on hard woods. Aspire is a top level program for sure, I do the Desktop version of V Carve and Fusion I have found Fusion is closer to 3Dstudio software package than the others if you are already familiar with mesh and poly work it is easier to use but the features in Aspire are very nice. Not many programs can out do Aspire or Fusion that I am aware of.
Ran the finishing pass last night. 60 IPM, 1/8" ballnose, 12% Stepover.
3 out of 4 pieces cut great. The first piece has some weird stepping in it. Check out the video. Can anyone help diagnose what could cause these rings? They seem to happen almost at regular intervals or spacing… Makes me think there’s a bump in the rails or something in that area.
Thoughts?
