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Messages - artcarver

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1
My name is Alan. I like CNC. I make artistic 3D relief work for cnc.

I like to brows around the forum and see what's going on.

2
Share Your GCode / Re: Total Newbie biting off more than he can chew
« on: January 17, 2017, 11:04:31 PM »
I've made hundreds of military emblems and stuff. You can see some of the stuff that I've done in the video on my web site. Maybe you're interested.

http://www.cncproductionwork.com

Alan
Hi
My machine is still in transit but I have been playing with the demo of Mach3 to try and familiarise myself with it.

I would like to use the machine to carve the logo for the motorcycle group I am in here in Western Australia.

The machine I have purchased is the  3 axis  3020 CNC Router engraver

I would like to ask is the attached file too difficult or complex, both for me and the machine?

I will attach the jpg along with the dxf file.

I know I will be learning a lot in a short time but if someone could advise if its too difficult a job and perhaps even translate it into gcode, ready to run in Mach3

I can hand carve this logo with a reasonable accuracy over a couple of days however it still looks amateurish.

Any help offered will be gratefully accepted


3
General Mach Discussion / Kind of Like Limit Switch Resetting or Something
« on: September 30, 2014, 09:31:04 AM »
I do mostly back and forth carving using Mach3. Since I have stepper motors and not servo, the computer doesn't know if steps are missed. I sometimes have this problem when I do deeper carves.

So I was thinking, what if I could set up Mach3 to touch the limit switch at the end of each line and then accurately go on the next line. If I was able to do this it would be more accurate, and would automatically make up for missed steps if any occur. It would kind of set it back in line each pass.

Does anybody know if this is possible with Mach3?

4
General Mach Discussion / Re: servo hot to the touch
« on: September 05, 2014, 09:16:23 AM »
I turned up the stepping and adjusted the motor tuning and turned down the decay and power on the breakout board and the y axis is less hot. When the motor stays locked in at one position for a long time it seems to get hotter. I also put some heat sinks on my motors.

5
You might need to look into calibrating your machine distances using the Set Steps Per Unit on the Settings page.

Here's a youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkO5tc-jSxw

6
That's helpful information about the tool changer. For the time being I'm only doing the one pass, since I'm only going up to .5 inch depth. And I'm using between 64 and 128 steps per inch which actually just shaves a little at a time. You see I'm basically trying to get my machine to work much like my Carvewright machine. Same bit, same back and forth raster carving. So far it's been doing pretty good. I'm not able to get the speed that I would like but it's almost as fast. And it's not missing any steps.

7
Thanks, adprinter

Yes there is a lot to get to know when starting out with g-code and cnc. I have edited the F federate several times. I guess I was just unclear about the creation of the g-code from images from various software applications. When I create the g-code in Linux cnc it looks much different from this other software simplycnc art. I was thinking that maybe some software stepping may be different. I know that I can change the y stepping to make more steps per inch but what about the z.

In any case I'll get the hang of it over time. I went ahead and bought the bmp2cnc software. I like the fact that you can select the outside zero depth areas and create the code to omit this area. This feature in itself will shave much of the time off. Bmp2cnc also takes into account the tool size that you set it up for and offsets the g-code accordingly which is visible through the 3D screen preview. I've not actually tested the code on a project yet but will be doing so today. The software puts some sort of tool change code in when it creates the code but I have figured out how to select and delete it since I don't have a tool changer.

I'll keep the MeshCAM in mind for the future. Maybe they have some info on they're web site too.

8
I don't have much knowledge about g-code or how it works on different machines and what not. I don't know if it's necessary to set up different plunge rates or if g-code is different when you use different software to make it. Is g-code different if you lets say use one plunge rate. I mean like the numbers. Well I guess I'm just not very knowledgeable about it.

This g-code that I've posted is very simple and just has the one F50 at the beginning that sets the speed. I find that I had to adjust my z axis velocity to slow it down for plunging using the motor tuning in Mach3.

Any insight to this would be welcomed.

I've been looking at this program called bmp2cnc that has some nice features and I can see that it does actually change the tapering around steep objects when you put in different angled bits. I plan on getting that software unless anybody knows of another one maybe to create raster carving tool paths.

Alan

9
This is one of the military patterns I have up on ebay for sale. But I don't have g-code up and ready for ebay though. And this pattern is made for about 9.5" in diameter. It doesn't really get as good a resolution as the other one which is like 12.5". But I'll try to post a 7zip file if anybody wants to try it. Like I said its 64 lines per inch and 1/4 inch depth.

It took me about 2 hours to run at about 80 feed rate. I also have my z axis turned down real low to slow down for the plunging. But maybe your machine is tougher than mine. You need to run this with one of those pencil shaped carving bitts to get the detail: http://www.ebay.com/itm/TAPERED-TOOL-FOR-THE-CARVEWRIGHT-OR-COMPUCARVE-MACHINES-2-1-2-OAL-/380925105790?pt=Routers_Bits&hash=item58b0e7d67e.

10
I've attached an image of my first carve from my DIY CNC run with Mach3. The g-code I created was 10 mb and set up to do 64 passes per inch. I'm surprised at the file size that I can use on my 10 year old computer that I use to run my machine. The depth of carve is 1/4".

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