anyone know how to resurface a piece of plywood with easel pro?
Are you sure you want to surface plywood?
The general technique for surfacing is to draw a large rectangle that’s bigger than your material, and set it’s depth to however much you want to remove.
If you have a surfacing bit (like the one that comes with the X-Carve Pro), that is a good choice.
You’ll need a way to clamp down the material. This can be the trickiest part, unless you have places you can screw straight through the material. If the bottom is also uneven, shimming it is a good choice. Side-clamping might be enough if you take shallow passes.
Other than that, if you have Easel Pro, it might be worth changing the direction of the milling to along the Y axis if you see ridges, because that can help hide tramming issues along the X-axis.
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Thanks for replying, I appreciate your taking the time out to respond; I know that most people are busy around the holidays with family and bills and just life in general. The reason I am using plywood is because I generally get free pieces from my job since we usually throw it into the trash dumpster. Also, since I am a newbie I figured it would be better to start with what would be scrap wood instead of spending money for good wood since I am still in the learning process. I know about the whole making sure my cut width and height is larger than my actual work piece; however, that does not seem to work for me so well. I couldn’t afford anything better than a masuter pro and so that’s what I went with, they were having a special at the time offering the masuter pro along with a 710 1 hp watt fox alien trimmer router for $630.00… I have watched several tutorial videos on easel and decided to go with their subscription $216.00 for a year; I have a very poor internet connection where I am at and I’m not sure if that is why; but I can’t seem to get a decent piece finished… I have gotten better at adjusting the “cut settings” and have went from 3 to 4 hours for my average cut to half an hour to an hour for the roughing cut and another half an hour for the finished cut. As far as bits go, after a couple of weeks of looking and comparing I decided to go with a set of solid carbide nano blue coated bits from a company called eyryfui off of Amazon. ANY advice you can offer will be great fully appreciated; thanks again!
Just my 2 cents, skip the plywood and buy some solid wood. Basswood or Poplar are pretty cheap. Poplar is available at home centers, as is dimensional pine.
Unless you are using primo baltic birch ply, there’s a good chance you will run into voids, and if you need to surface it, you could end up with the outer plies perpendicular to each other. You could also get a hunk of foam or MDF if you can handle the dust.
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Using plywood because I’m new at this and it’s free from my job.
If that is still relevant:
It doesn’t matter whether you use plywood or any other wood. The technique is the same.
- Secure the Material and measure it. Draw a rectangle in Easel that covers the workpiece. Be careful with the clamps - the bit should not hit them.
- Measure the height difference at the corners. Based on this, set the cutting depth.
- Double-check that the bit won’t hit the clamps.
- Start the process, and be ready to stop it, especially if you’re not an experienced user.
I often use the X-Carve for surfacing, clamping the workpiece around the perimeter (if it is high enough).