Carving

[Kerry Fullington]

I ran a fairly detailed carving last Friday. There were approx. 800,000 lines of code with lots of small, jerky movements on the machine. Another local shop owner said that this type of carving wore out the drive motors on his machine.
My question, Is this type carving hard on the router?

[Will Williamson]

Slow the feed rate down to 150 ipm

[Kerry Fullington]

Thanks Will,

I had the tool at 200 ipm in the design but I slowed the machine to 60%.

[Josh Rayburn]

Hi Kerry,
On my machine the tangency factor could be changed to better suit those types of short movements, and make things less jerky.
On the machine you're using, it could be a little different, I'm not sure.
What controller do you have?
jnr

[Kerry Fullington]

Thanks Josh,

We are running the Gen 2 Supercontrol and will be upgrading to the Q-Core shortly. I will look into adjusting the tangency factor. This particular carving ate up four hours of machine time as is so if slowing the machine down as Will mentioned is the only option, it would make it where we couldn't offer many carvings. They would just be too expensive to run.

[Josh Rayburn]

I hear ya Kerry - they are indeed a slow process. There are so many easy sources for carvings that it's hard for us to compete! I think I've done...maybe one carving over the past 3 years....?

[Kerry Fullington]

Outsourcing carvings is definitely less expensive but an integral carving looks and feels so much better than an applied one.

[Josh Rayburn]

I don't know what you were carving but there's always those hand tool thingies - they cause less wear and tear on the CNC!

Haha!
jnr

[Kerry Fullington]

But they require talent.

[Daniel Vonderheide]

Kerry,

On the Gen 2 and the Qcore you really dont need to adjust the tanfac. What you would really want to adjust is your accelerations. If you change from 100 percent (G800) accellerations to 70 percent (G803), you should see an improvement on the shaking and you will not loose as much time in the machininig.

[Will Williamson]

Daniel can you just insert this line ( G803 )at the beginning of the program?
Kerry another thing that seams to help is to raster in the Y direction if possible. Rapid raster acceleration in the x direction causes the whole gantry to shake.

[Daniel Vonderheide]

Will,

You can place the acceleration macro anywhere in the program and it will take effect immediately. If you want to slow the accelerations down only on the carving, you can add a G803 before it starts on that section of the code and then place a G800 afterwards so the rest of the cutting is at regular accelerations.