Testing 1st vcarves

Test cuts on some mdf, added some contrast on the 2nd. Mdf on mdf doesn’t show detail very well. But I’m pretty happy, good enough to try it on some actual wood. 10" plaques.


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Wow, nice!

Those look great, I can not wait to see the final carve.

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These are your firsts?? You must have had prior cnc experience right? Looks great nice job

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You just have to take the plunge. One of my first project was a carve as well to bribe someone… :smiley: It did work. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve been playing with it for a while on an xcarve, but finally put all of the mpcnc parts together. It’s been getting some light work as I learn the new machine and I’m running it right now about 6 hours a day to make these. It’s about 2.5-3 hours on the clearing and then an hour or 2 on the final carve.

Cool, can’t wait to see what you make next.

Make sure you are hanging out by your machine so you can step in if it starts on fire or does something weird.

This sounds like a lot. Did you use Estlcam 11 or 12? 12’s carving is a lot better. :smile:

Vcarve pro, 1/8th inch clearance and then 90v. I’m not pushing the machine hard yet so I’m not messing with speed until i really trust it and doing shallow passes on clearing.

I have E12 but haven’t tried it on a carve yet. I wasnt seeing great results on anything other than basic 2.5d so i moved back to vcarve. I should probably give it a shot since i have to design at home and then drive to the makerspace to actually generate the gcode. I’m to cheap to buy vcarve :smile:

I actually timed 1 yesterday, just under 2 hours to clear and about an hour on the vbit. Theyre a 10" circle, depending on the design there is a lot of wood to remove.

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I’ve been doing 1/4" depth on them, switched to an 1/8th on the last one. Faster obviously, and I think the end result looks better.

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I ‘briefly’ loaded into E12 to see what it would do. It’s a convoluted mess and I have no idea what it will turn out :laugh: I can see using it for simple carves but assuming it can do what I’m doing, I need to practice with it a lot. The vcarve interface for these is just not in the same category.

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A redesign to bring a bit of uniformity to the project, and I’ve got the main military done. I’m moving on to local agencies now.




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