I’m creating the female pocket of an inlay project and VCarve Pro is picking up all the text except for the cursive text. Help!!! What am I doing wrong?
Start depth: 0.00
Flat Depth: 0.30
I’m using a tapered bit that I’ve entered as a engraving bit with the following data:
Type: Tapered angle Ball Nose End Mill / Cone Cutters
-Flutes: 2 Flutes
-Tip Radius: 0.5mm
-Shank Diameter: 1/4"((d1)
-Cutting Length: 1-1/4"(L1)
-Overall Length: 3"(L)
-Single side angle B=4.82°(Approx.)
It would be helpful to know exactly what font you’re trying to use, and possibly a screenshot of the text on screen, but a few things I can think of include:
Single-Line Fonts: If you’ve chosen a single-line font, it’s important to note that VCarve toolpaths require closed vectors to operate. Single-line fonts don’t provide this, which might be why the carving isn’t happening.
Try converting the font to curves using the “Convert to Curves” tool and see if you can get any results.
Narrow Vector Lines: For the font and size selected, it’s possible the vector lines are too narrow for the VCarve operation.
You can also try to enhance your toolpath preview quality. Navigate to Toolpaths → Preview Simulation Quality → Set to Maximum, then zoom in closely and adjust the preview angle. This may reveal minimal carving attempts that were too slight to notice initially.
In my case, when certain fonts don’t carve well or yield unsatisfactory results, I find it easier to switch to a different font. I have also downloaded a number of fonts via simple online searches and achieved good results.
Thank you for your response. Whenever I assign a vbit it shows that it’s carving it in the tool path preview. The only time it has an issue in the preview is when I select a engraving bit.
I should add that I purchased this file from Etsy
Thanks for the screenshot. From what I can see, I’m almost positive that the vector lines making up the cursive font are too narrow for the selected V-Bit. Based on the screenshot, if you compare the distances between the vectors for your block-style text to those of the cursive font, the latter appears significantly smaller.
To confirm this, I suggest conducting a test. You could copy and paste a single cursive letter, or, if you prefer not to convert the font to curves, you could (as an experiment) select the entire block of text and significantly increase its size. I mean, make it really big—triple, quadruple, or even more than its current size. Then, use this enlarged size as the selection for whatever toolpath you’ve created and recalculate.
If you see an actual carving in the preview, then you can start reducing the size in practical, incremental steps. This process will allow you to not only observe how the VCarve operation functions (especially how the software manages the depth of cut) but also to determine the exact minimum size at which this particular font can be used, based on your chosen V-Bit and depth settings, before it becomes uncarvable.
Another option is to switch to a bit with a really small angle, somewhere between 5 and 10 degrees, just to find out what the minimum size limit is for a bit like that. While you may not currently own a bit with such a small angle, you can still add one to the database—either from scratch or by duplicating an existing, larger angle bit and manually adjusting the angle.
If these suggestions don’t work or fail to produce a usable result, then I’m all out of ideas. Hopefully, others in the forum can offer additional help or alternatives.
Thank you for your advice. I’ll give it a try and see what the outcome is.
