cutting stops mid part

[Wayland Harman]

While cutting dovetail drawer box's my machine sometimes stops while cutting the male pins. The spindle stays on but wont continue cutting until I press block stop plus and then run. I was running a series of test drawer box's and had this happen several times on one, once or twice on some and not at all on others. The only change I was making was to increase the dovetail bit diameter to tighten up the fit. I am using the standard, slide in drawer bottom, dovetail file. This stopping occurred mostly on the runs that were a very loose fit and went away when the fits were coming out better.
Has anyone else had this issue, and found a reason for this odd pause.
BTW, the drawer boxes are awesome. We had a client come in while I was working on this who was quite impressed. They were not aware that I was at the helm kicking the machine with block step plus to keep it cutting. I was able to get a great fit by adjusting the dovetail tool diameter and did not change any other settings. My final diameter for that tool is .367, though it measures .312 at the narrowest point of the cutting edges. Am I just lucky or is this a common way to adjust the fit of dovetails?

[Pete Riddle]

Wayland,

The most common reason for the "pause" you are referring to, is that the tool you are using to cut the male pins is exactly the corner radius used to create the drawer box. When this happens radius comp cannot be applied properly by the machine. You can correct this problem by decreasing your .25 tool diameter to .249, this should allow the program to cut correctly (You will have to re-nest though). You can also use a .1875 tool which tends to handle almost any setting, but care has to be given to feed speeds for the smaller tool.

The proper way to adjust your fit is through the drawer box construction settings and the crunch radius in Control Nesting. Follow this link to get some more information about the crunch settings.

http://order.ecabinetsystems.com/update ... Manual.htm

Thanks,