Messages

41

General Mach Discussion / Re: Gecko LED dimming

« on: February 08, 2016, 07:43:09 AM »

Yes, they are normally attached, I just swapped them to see if the problem would follow with the Gecko or remain.  At that point, I realized all Geckos on all axes were dimming.  No idea why.  The machine is 10 years old and have never had a problem with it.

42

General Mach Discussion / Gecko LED dimming

« on: February 04, 2016, 08:45:33 AM »

So my machine lost position two days ago during normal routine.  Went to trouble shoot and noticed the LEDs on the Geckos are dimming during jogging.  Got the multimeter to test voltage.  Did several tests, but tested the voltage from the power ground terminal on the gecko (far left) to the terminal right next to it (says 24-80vdc) and got a reading of about 53 volts on all 4 geckos during a normal file run.  Granted, the router was not running during this test, but it seemed to run fine.

I did check out the y motors to see if there was binding, which might result in a higher amp draw to move the motors, but they are fine, no binding.

No idea what would cause a Gecko drive to have LED dimming while jogging.

Ideas?

43

General Mach Discussion / Re: Ditching the Vacuum Hold Down

« on: February 01, 2016, 07:29:31 AM »

The part would be completely done after the onion skinning.  I've used tabs before, but then there's the manual sanding after the fact to get rid of the tab.  This job is 300 dog cutouts.  As for other parts, I'm hoping for much higher quantities.  Just trying to automate as much as possible.

44

General Mach Discussion / Ditching the Vacuum Hold Down

« on: February 01, 2016, 06:25:44 AM »

Hey guys, I am going to be cutting out some dog cutouts for a customer out of 3/4" plywood (11 or 12 ply birch).  The dog measures 14x10.5".  I'm also looking at cutting out smaller parts.  So I'm told that below a certain surface area, vacuum cannot hold down small parts due to atmospheric pressure.  Two questions:

Does this include a dedicated spoilboard with gasketing where the vacuum will not be opened up at all after the cut process?

The other idea is to ditch vacuum altogether and onion skin the parts, rip the plywood into 2' x 8' sheets, and send through a drum sander to dislodge the small parts.  I know the part will be thinner but this dimension does not matter to my customer at all.  Has anyone ever tried this?  I wouldn't have to set up a dedicated spoilboard for each job if I did this.

Thank you in advance!

45

General Mach Discussion / Re: Sign Making with Different Thicknesses of Materials

« on: February 01, 2016, 06:18:14 AM »

Hey guys, love all the ideas, that's why I come to this forum.  Thanks so much for all your replies and ideas.  I learn something new every time I come here.  I will take all ideas under advisement.  Have an awesome day cutting something on your CNC!

Bill

46

General Mach Discussion / Sign Making with Different Thicknesses of Materials

« on: January 28, 2016, 06:48:50 AM »

Ok guys, I use my CNC's for Vcarving only.  We get 3/4" pine from our suppliers and life is good, that is until someone forgets to plane the material one last time, and the whole unit is thicker than normal.

At any rate, for anyone who does Vcarving, you know that material thickness is crucial, too thick and the letters appear too deep.  Too thin, and the letters are not deep enough.  S4S stuff is never a problem for us.

So we have a customer who does a ton of business with us who got the bright idea to buy some closeout wood from someone.  18,000 pcs of rough cut pine that varies in thickness +/- 1/16".  I already told this guy the thickness needs to be right on the money all through this supply of wood, but he didn't listen.  So I have some boards that are fully 1/8" thicker than others.  This will be a Vcarving nightmare.

So my question is, is there another bit that can be used to make suitable signs?  This customer is used to all the different fonts you can achieve with a Vbit, so extremely boring and straight fonts with no letter thickness variation will probably not fly for this guy.  Fonts like Arial are totally out of the question.  Any ideas?  I simply cannot plane the material as I do not have a planer.  Plus I think this guy wants the rough look anyway.

47

General Mach Discussion / Re: Vcarving to Letter Cutout

« on: December 16, 2015, 06:19:37 AM »

That's an interesting idea.  So I can export from CorelDraw as a plt file, but when I try to import that file into Vectric VCarve 6.5 it says "Format not implemented." 

48

General Mach Discussion / Re: Vcarving to Letter Cutout

« on: December 10, 2015, 01:17:13 PM »

As pertaining to CV mode and such, now I've done a simple shape cutout (a star like shape) that has 5 inside corners.  I'm using a 3/8" diameter cutting tool, so I know the inside will not be 100% sharp, but this thing seems like it's really rounding the inside corners so much so that the shape is not that close to my original drawing.  Is there some mode where mach is trying to round that inside corner too much??

Bill

49

General Mach Discussion / Re: Vcarving to Letter Cutout

« on: December 10, 2015, 08:30:53 AM »

Thanks so much for the replies, I really appreciate it.

The post processor I'm using is the EZ-Router/Mach3 PP in Vectric.

The arc/line segment thing makes a lot of sense to me.

I do have the machine in CV mode.

What I did do was change my look ahead from 20 lines to 30 lines and took my accel values down from 20 to 7.  Velocity is still set at 750.  Now running at 700 ipm this thing has almost no noticeable jerk movements.  But I do have a question about look ahead.  Is there a top value that I should avoid on look ahead so many lines?  Like 30 seems really good, but still just a tiny bit of jerking around serifs.  Just a tiny bit.  But, I'd like to be perfect on it with no jerking.  Any thoughts?

Would taking the feed rate to 600 ipm make a difference at all do you think?

Bill

50

General Mach Discussion / Vcarving to Letter Cutout

« on: December 10, 2015, 07:10:02 AM »

Hi Everyone:

So for years I have been doing signs - all v carving stuff.  Now I'm doing some product testing where we are actually cutting letters out. 

All motion is smooth on the machine when doing a v carving tool path.  But yesterday when I went to cut out a few letters I had some very jerky movement.

Feed rate is set to 700ipm, so I thought maybe it was missing steps so I reprogrammed the file to run at 80 ipm which is waay slow if you ask me.
Still the jerky movement, but just slower jerks I guess.

I generated my vectors in CorelDraw and found out that the letter C had a zillion nodes so I was guessing that it was trying to cut a zillion line segments.

So I tested another font that seems to have less nodes.  So there was less jerking, but still jerking around the serifs on the letter.  Is there a way to set up the machine
so there is fluid movement all the way around the shape?  I have to believe that the people doing cutout stuff all day long don't deal with this.  But I'm at a loss.  Any help
is appreciated.

Thanks so much
Bill