I cannot seem to do a V-bit carve for the life of me. Every time I do everything is wonky and blown out. This one is especially frustrating because I'm using the same cutter and material as the guy I bought the file from. Let me give you a little background so hopefully someone can help me walk through this. Openbuilds Workbee 1510 Estlcam Openbuilds Control Amana 90° V-Bit RC-45711 (even ran a 2nd time with a different bit, same result) Cellular PVC for Material I'll post photos of my carve and a carve done by the person I bought the file from.
I love Estlcam and it is my CAM of choice until I want to engrave something with a Vbit. All those little circles are showing on the edge. I just tried to generate G-code for a trophy plaque I make very year as a joke during a fishing trip with estlcam and it was taking forever so I shut it down. I purchased VCarve Desktop about a year ago for the rotary machining capability and finally got around to using it for that and other stuff about two weeks ago. It is worth every penny. That being said, until I made the rotary I used F-engrave to generate the engraving g-code and used Estlcam to execute it. The plaque I mentioned earlier takes about 10 seconds for F-engrave to calculate the tool paths after I select the maximum depth and feed rate. However, I have only ever used F-engrave to center an engraving onto the material. I have never used it where the engraving had to go out to the edges like yours, but that can easily be overcome. What depth of cut were you using? I could not see what the maximum depth was that you chose with Estlcam. I would offer to try it for you on some scrap here with V-care and Fengrave, but it is a paid for file so that may be good to be passing it back and forth. Where did you purchase it from? If it is reasonable, I may buy it to see if I can get it to work right.
Looking at the original,(letter B) it looks like you need a flat area clearance tool as well for that job. Seems like there's a flat bottom to that character (maybe others) with just a bevel around the edge?
Okay, so it seems I resolved the issue and it was 100% software related. In Estlcam, theres an "Automatically create" function for carve. It automatically makes your toolpaths for you to create a v-carve. The problem was two fold, it was completely overriding my shallow depth limit and was also blowing out all the detail. If I made the toolpaths individually, this didn't happen.
That's Good you got it figured out. I was going to say judging by the first Picture it looks to have been done with a spiral Up-cut then profiled with a v-bit. I Found doing this makes it a lot Cleaner.
