I was watching some videos on using estlcam for carving with a vbit. I tried yesterday but it just stayed above the surface and never actually cut into it. in older estlcam videos there was a “toolpath depth” option, but now there is only “depth limit”. What settings do i need to change to be able to tell it how deep into the material i want to cut.
People should correct me if I’m wrong but depth limit is the maximum depth you want your final cut to go. So taking your depth limit / z steps (in your case 3mm) it provides the amount of passes needed to reach that depth.
so i should read “depth limit” as “toolpath depth”? meaning that what value i put in “depth limit” say 3mm, it will cut down 3mm? because i was leaving it blank because it says it will auto calculate, but as i stated, it never cut down into the material.
It could be a few things. You should zip and upload your gcode.
Did you start at the material top and reset the coordinates to 0,0,0? You have a maximum carve width of 0.25mm…it might take a really long time to get into the material at that width. Adjust that number and watch the path change.
You have to give more details to get more relevant answers.
And you don’t have a tool selected.
i know i can adjust the width, and the tool is the engraving bit. the problem is it never goes down and cuts into the material. I don’t see where to adjust “toolpath depth”. yes i start on material top and reset coord.
i think i get it now, thanks
Can you please share the issue for anyone reading this in the future.
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i believe it was the way i was thinking about it. by increasing the width of the toolpath you also increase the depth. and there is no direct input for how deep to cut it.
In the screenshot you uploaded the setting is the first one, depth limit. That controls everything wider than your bits diameter.
After your help and playing around with it i understand now. Quick question though, howcome if i change all of my carve “depth limit” to be only 3mm deep, it adds hours onto machine time. if left as auto it doesn’t take that long, i figured if i was telling it not to go as deep it would be a shorter machine time. It doesn’t appear that way though.
I have no idea without gcode or path screen shots. It should be very clear by looking at what is happening on the screen.
Sounds like a shallower depth is requiring you to make more cuts to get the entire width, when it is deeper a single pass can get both sides at once without needing to also clear a flat bottom spot. You should see a huge difference in how the path looks. Couple hundred lines vs couple thousand.
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I see what you’re talking about now, i set the depth for the inner parts and left the outer parts automatic. i see the thousands of line in the parts i set the depth to. so if i wanted to pocket those inner parts out. i would just do the carve and then measure how deep it cut and make the depth of my endmill the same?
