I have been working with the 60 and 90 degree v carve bits. Every time I cut, no matter what adjustments I make, it is leaving step like grooves on the sides. Any suggestions?
Run the carve one more time, but this time full depth only as a finishing pass?
Might want to leave some stock after first pass so the finish pass have some material to clear.
Your bit won’t be exactly as advertised. Either in angle, width or both. If those settings are off, you end up with grooves.
There are several potential reasons why this could be happening. They can range from tool inaccuracies to software errors. The most likely (I’m guessing here…) would be one of the following.
There’s a chance your machine isn’t perfectly square to the table/material. This could be because the work isn’t perfectly flat on the table, the table isn’t square to the machine’s axes, or your toolbit axis isn’t square in one or more axis. Look up “tramming” or “aligning”.
There’s a pretty good chance, that some or all of this is due to the machine “flexing” under load. V carving can (depending upon how you do it) sometimes force the machine to take deeper or heavier cuts that you might otherwise ask it to do. This can allow the flexing of the tool away from the material to show up as steps along the shoulders of your cuts. One simple method of correcting for this is to simply run the code twice. Do your first cut and then simply repeat exactly the same cut a second time. On the first pass, your tool does what it does now and may flex during heavier portions of the cut. On the second pass, while the machine might be “cutting air” for much of the time, when it travels along its original path, there’s very little materiel left to cut and so typically, is just skims along and cleans things up. Downside is that it takes exactly twice as long…
Another option is that there is an amount of ‘backlash’ in your setup. Backlash is the amount of “free play” that exists at the toolbit. This can be be the accumulation of loose belts, machine flex, bearing movement etc etc. With the system running, so the steppers are locked (but with power isolated to the spindle) see how much you can flex the tool bit. If you can see where any movement is coming from, you’ll see where you need to take action.
Not sure if this helps or not…