I’ve got a small 8" x 8" carve I’m wanting to do, but when I allow Estlcam make the choice to path the letters, it seems that the cutter goes back and forth poking holes like a printer playing connect the dots before it gets too work on actual carving. Is this normal, or am I stuck with a machine that likes to make me neurotic?
Would it be best to force the gcode/Estlecam/v-bit to complete one letter at a time while I set it up in CAM? I’m wondering if I might get a cleaner project cut.
Here’s my latest attempt. I’m not going on finished process again until this is fixed! Note that the names have holes poked in there and the border started in the wrong location and got worse. Supposed to be a 7" box around the names. Oh, and the Celtic knot isn’t centered over the names.
I’m going to ready the whole thing from inkscape into CAM and try to force the carve order.
Oh, I just did that today btw. Estlcam 12 generates a lot cleaner toolpaths when doing multiple carves. Besides that, the holes that are being poked are not right and have got nothing to do with G-Code generation. Would you mind uploading your DXF for me to check?
Here is a comparison of the G-Code generated by 11 (left) and 12 (right). You can see that 12 takes less time for half the carved birds, because it does one bird first, then the next:
I just visited Estlcam site and it only has 11.245. Am I missing something? - Edit: I see that 12 is in Beta. I’m too much a newb to attempt that. But if you think it is stable enough, I’ll give it a whirl.
I ran it through AutoCAD with the overkill command and it deleted 18 duplicates of lines etc. I do not think that this was the problem though. Those holes mainly appear when there are leftovers that are being cut somehow. Estlcam 12 works pretty well, I’ve only encountered one error so far (but I mainly use 11 still, though this carve improvement might make me want to swap to 12 completely). 2UrnFace.dxf (573.1 KB)
