What Da? I just finished carving out a rosette, Fleur de Lis, pretty detailed… and it appears the finishing ball nose bit decided to put it’s 2 cents in there. It drilled an additional 2 holes, straight through. I was watching the entire process, as it just gallantly went about its business. I looked over the file itself, and I do not see these two holes anywhere, I zoomed in and nuttin’
For the life of me, I can’t figure this one out. The .250 End Mill Rough Bit did his job, then came the finishing touch -->. Bang, Bang!
I’m going to try this STL File again and see if it will do this again. Weird! Anybody wants to take a shot at what’s cookin’ here?
If you look at your toolpath in your design software likely you will see your bit was to large for the spaces. A hole fit but it couldn’t connect to the other openings. A vcarve would have gone shallow to draw the rossette in that space
OUCH! That’s unfortunate. Yeah that doesn’t look like a large end mill taking more material in a detailed area. It appears the program decided to plunge the end mill straight into the material like a drilling operation.
I’m not sure what software you are using. I know in Fusion I will run all of my tool paths virtually to see if there are any anomalies. Sometimes it can be the weirdest thing that causes unwanted tool path deviations.
Take a screen print of what it looks like at the end. If you watch it doe sit clear in the same places? The machine only does what is instructed (to my own disappointment when I make mistakes ;))
Create the toolpath with a 0.5mm tapered ball nose and I bet you will see a different outcome. The hard wall depths you have indicates that the bit cannot do the details because of its size.
Jenn, did you run a toolpath preview before you ran the actual file on your machine? The preview should look exactly like the actual and would have revealed this problem. I will always preview my toolpath before I run it to expose potential problems. From the preview you can figure out what went wrong before it actuality does on your piece.
Thanks for the tips guys! As it turns out, the holes were being made by my Profile Cut, I had set up my rosette with vector for profiling, but I wasn’t sure about the Machine Vectors Setting… So I had it set to (Inside Left)
I changed that to (Outside Right) and it carved my piece beautifully, I set up 2 tabs per leaf, a total of 8 so I can pop it out and lightly sand. I’ll post the photo later today, but here’s a model photo, for now -
Final question regarding my specific applications in relief carvings: I have been using a .250 square flat bit for roughing out the material and an eighth ball nose to finish with the detail carving, then profiling of course.
Q: should I go with a .250 Ball Nose bit to Rough out material or stick with the .250 Flat, I’m trying to wrap my head around the advantages of the ball nose.
I will often use just the 1mm tapered ball nose to do a 3D carving and eliminate the roughing toolpath altogether and save time since the finishing pass has to cover the entire area anyway. With an 8 or 10% step over the bit can handle it quite well.
Hmmm, I like that Al! I will have to pick up one of those 1mm Tapered Jammies, perhaps a few, since all of my work is 3D bas relief… If I can save some time, that will be music to my ears. Hey, maybe even let the damn tapered ball do all three steps, Rough, Finish and Profile, ya think? I don’t want to sacrifice quality though -
