Hi. After my first carve I noticed that the bit first contact with the wood is not very smooth. It is not terrible but if the Z axis speed were lowered it would be smoothing on contact. What I see is the bit moving a tiny bit off the precise contact point, like a very tiny initial giggle.
I’m using a Chinese cheap 1/8 4F bit, Dewalt D26200 16000 rpm, with all Easel default settings for MDF
That’s normal? Any easy way to tune the speed/acceleration like in 3d printers?
In Fusion360 you can to incorporate “ramps” where the bit enters the material at a shallow angle while traveling asking the cut path in the XY plane. I’ve been getting wonderful results with hard materials incorporating this feature.
What is this feature called? I can explore this in HSM Inventor (I dont have fusion360 but I would also like to be able to use Easel for most of the simple things due its accessibility)
Accessibility =/= usefulness. Easel is great for a lot of things, but machining hard woods and metals may require 3rd party software for high quality results. In Fusion, the feature is called “ramp” under the CAM program section. You open your 3D model in Fusion, do a “setup” where you select the coordinate system and stock settings, then do a 2D or 3D milling option where you select the tool diameter and other options. Ramp is one of them, for which you can select the angle, the maximum step down, the ramp feed rate (which can be different than the horizontal tooling feed rate) and more that I’m almost certainly forgetting.
Thanks. Will look for it. I guess it wastes a little material entering from an angle no? I was thinking on just decreasing the maximum Z mm/s easily without having to edit the firmware.
I agree with the usefulness thing but this is certainly a subjective thing where the product is constantly evolving. I feel that Easel smells like Arduino IDE, or Fritzing, or Sketchup. These tools have big powerhouses as nemesis, with much richer products but month after month they get a little bit better. Maybe not really with Sketchup… I moved to inventor after suffering with simple stuff there.
No, no, it doesn’t waste any material. Imagine you were cutting a circle out of material. Instead of “plunging” straight down to your DOC and then carving a circle, it’d instead cut a spiral. It removes the same amount of material, it just decreases Z axis height while tracing your shape. And you can set how quickly it gets to the DOC so it doesn’t have to be a spiral, it could just ramp quickly to the next DOC and then do a circle and then ramp to the next. Regardless, it follows the path of your shape. It just lets you decrease your height while cutting along the toolpath.
Vcarve also allows ramps, you can specify the ramp length. When using the ramp option it will start the cut at zero depth and then ramp down to the DOC over the length of the ramp distance, then the spindle is moved in reverse to the beginning of the cut (where the ramp started. Then the spindle reverses direction again and continues the cut to the full depth specified as normal.
So the ramp adds a little bit of time to the start of the cut, but I have found that it allows deeper DOC since the initial plunge and cut is not nearly as abrupt.
