I’m doing a v-carve inlay. The female workpiece is ancient white oak…so hard as a rock. The depth of cut total is .15. I know I can modulate the clearing path depth of cut on the male workpiece by doing a full clearing/flattening path, but that won’t work for the female side.
It’s a delicate piece, so I’m using 1/8" and 1/16" clearing bits…there’s simply no way I can do a full depth clearance path with them. If I slow it down to a crawl the bit quickly overheats.
Is there any way to do multiple clearance passes on the female workpiece?
VCarve (assuming that you mean V-carving with Vectric’s VCarve software) has pretty limited options, as far as toolpaths go. Take a look at DeskProto for CAM software. It’s really cheap, for what it offers. Anyway, it’d allow you to setup your clearance paths so that they cut along a single axis, or single direction along a single axis. I’ve found that cross grain cuts in really hard woods prevent large sections from chipping off during roughing. Could be useful with really old oak.
Very simple. Select the clearance bit you want to adjust in the “Use Clearance Tool” section of the toolpath dialogue. Then click the “edit” button below the list of clearance tools. You can adjust the pass depth for that individual tool there. BTW, this only impacts pass depth for that one tool in that one toolpath. It does not change the pass depth information you have stored in your tool database. Super handy feature. Hope this helps.
That is not true. Now matter what you set the pass depth at it will take the entire clearance in one pass. That’s why folks use the workaround for the plug side of the inlay.
Just to be clear, you want to do multiple passes with the clearance tools in a v-carve toolpath, correct? For example, if you are cutting to a depth of 0.15, you may want to do 15 passes with each clearing bit of 0.01 each.
Specifically, I want to do 5 clearances passes, each with a depth of .03. My coated 1/16" bit should be able to handle that. And I can do the v-bit carve first, so that helps a bit to take some of the pressure off the clearance paths.
