Hello there! I’m looking to carve a bunch of words in 1/2" birch plywood with the 60 deg. V bit. The simulator says it’s going to take over 7 hrs which seems like a really long time considering what I’m wanting to do. I have the depth of the carve set to .04" but and depth per pass set to .05" and feed rate is 60 ipm. Can I go a little faster or will it tear up the plywood and make rough/fuzzy cuts?
I think its probably going to splinter pretty bad. I seen on another forum a guyed Laminated Maple plywood that is Cabinet grade that done something similar to the above. Had a lot of detail that seemed to work well. Might just run a test pass and see what you get.
Good Luck.
I am thinking that your total depth dont allow the bit to reach both sides of the letter lines => a lot of stepover passes are introduced. (assuming Easel Pro, V-carving)
Try to set carve depth and depth per pass to 0.3" and simulate that, I suspect carve time will be reduced considerably.
I havent carved with 1/2" 60deg bit in ply so can not comment on speed/tear-out potensial.
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I created an 18"x12" piece with a lot of small text on it, set the depth to .05", and the estimated carve time was about 100 minutes. You might check your depths again.
It was still estimating over 6 hours and I"m not really sure why unless its simply because of the size of the project and the amount of text. They want it to be 30" x 30" but I might try to talk them into something smaller if it’s really going to take 6-7 hours. I played around with bits too… 1/16" doesn’t save much time. I thought with a V bit I could set the IPM to be faster without the risk of chip out. I’m also going to have Oracal masking on top so that should help a bit. Seems like I heard you can run a V bit at like 80-100 ipm depending on the job?
V-carving = continous X/Y and Z motion at the same time.
This means that the rapid/acceleration rates for Z in effect slows X/Y down too which will have a great impact on time.
It wont be calculated into the simmed time to carve though.
Try what Neil suggested, set the cut depth way low (far down) and do the same for depth per pass. This will make sure the bit travel each part in one pass and adjust cut width by changing Z-elevation.
There is a lot of text in your design, it will require a bit of time. However 6hrs seem excessive.