First 3D Carvings

[Dan M]

Looking good!! Have you cut any plywood? I'm about to run a bunch of frames out of some Birch and some other finish ply. I'm just curious if there's anything I should watch out for since I haven't cut any yet. Any tips would be great, I guess either way I'll find out tomorrow.

Thanks,
Dan

[todd432]

Hey Dan
I haven't cut much plywood, just the 3 shamrocks before I had all my problems.
But I would use a down cut or compression bit to minimize splintering.
The shamrocks were cut from 3/4 birch ply and had a coat of poly . It was scrap ply.
The other thing I tried was. to do a offset cut of .040 or .050 , on the final pass step back in .040 and reverse the direction to get rid of the DOC lines. It works good in V carve pro.

The setting is Do Separate last pass

[Dan M]

Thanks for the tip Todd I'll let you know how it goes as soon as I get two sided machining figured out. Lots of firsts on this job at least I know if I have any issues it won't be the controller.

Dan

[todd432]

Well I did the update to CNC12 4 .14 this weekend and it went pretty smooth.
So I tried it out on one of Vectrics project of the month.
It took 3 hours at 110 ipm 9% step over 1mm taper ball nose bit
No roughing passes just the finishing pass.

I tried it first at 150 ipm but my machine is not ridged enough, to much bounce in the Z transferring to the bed.
It reduced the cut time time by an hour but at a cost to the carving.

The pine was a little fuzzy/ stringy after so maybe I'll try a raster angle.

[martyscncgarage]

Very nice work! Great job!

[cnckeith]

wow! really cool!

[todd432]

So I have a little progress to report, with the help from Sword with the smoothing settings and some more time on the machine I gave it another go.
Its 17X24 roughly, 2 in thick pine
.
Machine time was about 14 hrs at 120 ipm with a 1mm tapered 2 flute ball nose EM 10% step over and 60 deg bit for the V carving and texturing.

The pix are right off the machine no sanding. I got to work on getting better with Vcarve and lay out with models and what not.
I think I'm one step closer to Scott's level

Todd

[Sword]

Nicely done Todd, looks great! Gotta love the "knot surprises" that happen, or what I was thinkin' when I first saw it, "snot surprise". Coming from Wisconsin's dairyland, we call that a farmer blow gone bad!

I've been using a 1.5mm ballnose quite a bit lately and it yields good detail and little clean up at 8% stepover.

Keep up the good work!

Scott

[todd432]

Hi all
I wanted to post an update on my 3D carving progress.
I'm making a wooden flag , that you probable have all seen on the web.
I'm making it for my step dad, he has worked or served his country most of his adult life.
It's just a little thank you project.

It's not finished yet ,but I wanted to show how the 3D badge CNCing turned out.
I cut this 3 times lol , at 5 hrs. each to get it were I wanted to be.
It is cut on maple 5/8 thick, it measures 11x14 roughly.
The flag is 19.5X 36

I used a 1/8 tapered ballnose bit 125 ipm 10% step over, I used a 22.5 raster angle in V carve no roughing, finishing pass only, and sword's 3D smoothing settings in CNC12

[Sword]

That's looking great Todd! The shield turned out really nice! Is that face glued plywood? Nice effect. Looking forward to some finished pics.

Don't know if I mentioned it before, but when you have walls that are perpendicular to the surface, try adding a slight draft to the model (12%-14%). If adding it to the whole model doesn't look good, sometimes you can just do it to the component. This allows the tool to slowly ride up the ramp of the draft instead of an abrupt stop and then raise up. It helps with time and also with edge quality at the wall due to tool chatter when it stops to raise up. But, I see you mentioned VCP so you can't do that in there.

Scott