Using Easel to design drawings for a Pen Plotter

I want to use Easel to design some drawings ( sharpie attached to my spindle ). I figured I would just set the cut dept to zero but when I do that the image in Easel fades out and is invisible. Is there a better way to do this ?

TIA
Tom

Sure, make a spring loaded pen holder and set carve depth to 1mm.

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Agree with @HaldorLonningdal.

Depending on the pen and machine, you might be better served without a spring. Add mass to keep the pen down and let your Z lift it up.

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Here is what I did.

@PhilJohnson designed a cool spring-loaded Sharpie mount. Do a quick search for “sharpie” and lots of cool things pop up.

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I just finished my first test of the sharpie pen holder tha Phil designed. Love it! I set the depth of cut to 1mm and adjusted the depth per pass also to 1mm. Used a form ear plug instead of a spring. Worked great. Will be doing other projects in the future. Again, thanks Phil

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Some great help here folks. To sum up for future searchers In Easel I set the cut depth to something very shallow. Then I fabricated a pen holder which allows for a wee bit of travel of the pen in the holder itself and some downward pressure to keep the pen pressed to the paper.

Thanks Folks

Hello. I was wondering if you could give me a bit more info on the settings so that i can use my sharpie with pen holder on my x.carve. What do you set the plunge rate & thickness of material to. thanks

First thing, the machine thinks it cutting. The first time I did a drawing I forgot that important item and did a lot of extra work.

Material thickness does not matter. I think I left the setting of .5 inch. My depth is only 1 mm. My depth of cut is also 1mm. I only want one pass.

I normally use the probe. Can’t do that with a sharpie, so I used the manual method to set the z.

Hope this helps you

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