Vectric Customer

Each time I have tried to carve a larger sign with a hard wood (Purple heart this time 23x12) the clearing pass at random times will take a deep plunge. Of course this ruins the wood for this sign, but I have looked to find any mistakes in my program and have not found it. What am I doing wrong?

Can you post your file? ->How do I upload files or photos to the forum?

...if your file is too large (over 2MB), then you will need to use a free service such as DropBox to upload the file to. Then, you copy and paste the download link here for us to be able to download the file.

As mentioned, this can only be assessed with a look the real file but what happens all the time is when you have a rather detailed model with small deep pits or holes, the roughing bit (if you do that at all) may not fit into these holes and skip them but the smaller finishing bit will. That may make the finish bit plunge deep into solid material at high speed with unpleasant results.

Having problems with dropbox, soon as I get that figured out I will upload it.

YOU are probably not doing anything wrong. I looked at your file, no problems that I could detect.

But your machine is probably having an issue, which could be lots of things. With what you wrote the very first thing that would come to my mind is electrical interference. When a machine goes on the warpath like you describe it is not usually a matter of losing a few steps here and there. Besides, your depth of cut is very shallow and on work of that type the Z axis does not get a workout that would expose the usual suspects.

IMHO, not a software problem or operator problem.

Just looked at your gcode, no problem there either. The deepest move on Z that I could find was Z-.120, which is what you programmed. Ya got a machine problem.

Thank you for the help. Guess I will work on it from the other side.

Just a thought, BUT do you have ALL power saving setting to OFF, All Updates turned OFF, Anti-Virus turned OFF?
Not familiar with your machine, but if it uses a control computer...are you running the file from C: or the USB....running from USB can cause problems sometimes.

Is machine on separate breaker?
Is any large machinery kicking in during the cut(my compressor used to cause a fluctuation)?
Do you have a bare copper wire Inside the DC hose, and grounded back to the vac?

Just thinking:)
scott

I had a similar problem and yes it also was with expensive beautiful, spalted pecan. I made sure to do a deep clean and lubricate my machine (even though I do this on a regular basis), I checked my Aspire files (everything was okay) and I decided to get busy and run the bare grounding wire for my dust collection system. Things are just fine at this time. Good luck.

Thank you for the help everyone. I am in hopes that this is a computer issue rather then a machine problem. I have been in touch with Carbide for their assistance. I will let you know what they have to say.

I looked at each toolpath. With some, the depth is set in inches and the pass depth is set in mm. This may be good and maybe not. I've never tried it so I can't say if it is what the problem is or not. I just thought I'd throw it out there as an observation and maybe someone else that knows more about it can chime in.

SteveNelson46 wrote:I looked at each toolpath. With some, the depth is set in inches and the pass depth is set in mm. This may be good and maybe not. I've never tried it so I can't say if it is what the problem is or not. I just thought I'd throw it out there as an observation and maybe someone else that knows more about it can chime in.

Steve, as I posted above, I read the gcode file. I could not find any Z value deeper than -.120. That whole mm v inch thing was tossing me a curve too. I run into the same thing on my machine with the metric tools. As soon as the tool is defined in mm then Aspire wants to insist on specifying some of the parameters in mm. I am about to redefine them as imperial tools with a (6mm) in the name field.