Hi, iv struggled with my first project and ended up wrecking it. I have my business and my family so I dont have alot of free time…
I was hoping i could paysome to help me do my first project with doing all my computer stuff.
Thanks
What is it that you are trying to accomplish with this project? If you post some additional details maybe someone can help or point you in the right direction.
Hi. So iv attached my project.
I do tile and stone work. So i have altered the machine to work with water. Also with using my diamond bits i was able to measure them with my caliper and reference them and create my own.
I started with using a 20" piece of Carrera marble and got through the first roughing stage with no problems ( ill attach photos of it and of my file/rendering)
Once i tried to do my 2nd tool i reslly struggled with getting my file correct with my x y z.
Iv homed it correctly i think. But my machine never seems to line up and do what i want.
I was hoping someone could do a walk-through with me on it all so i can get comfortable and not spend countless hours of downtime learning. And instead get some help and a some personal lessons on my specifc projects.
Thanks
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How are you setting the origin for your tile? Are you using a touch plate or just eyeballing the x, y, and z of the bottom left corner? For precision stuff like youre looking to do, you really want to use a touch plate to set the origin.
When you switch to your second tool, you should only have to adjust the z height to accommodate the new bit. The XY shouldn’t need to be moved, unless you move the material for some reason. Having x or y move even slightly from the coordinates used for the roughing pass will really mess up a 3D carve.
Dan
We are eye balling it. The touchplate doesn’t recognize/acknowledge the diamond tools. The tools just push the touch plate off the material.
And yes we did end up loosing the first initial xy origin/home and for the second bit we just moved the machine back to with .01 of the first initial home and tried to get it as close as possible as the first home setting.
I would recommend using a regular endmill for setting your xy origin with the touchplate. Even of you don’t use it for the cut, it’s a good way to accurately find the xy origin and it’ll give you repeatability in the event that the origin is lost and you have to set it again.
You’ll should be alright setting the z height without the probe on marble, since the bit won’t dig into the material like it would on a piece of wood.
You may want to also consider doing an initial test run with a piece of plywood.
Dan
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Basically what Dan says!
Please remeber, there is a machine home which is unreliable on the 1F Buildbotics version, and a work home.
To begin with you need a reliable repeatable X/Y origin. You should start with a regular endmill to probe X/Y. You can either use the edge of the marble with the touch probe (if you don’t cut that edge away), that will then be your work home (X/Y).
Or you can place a block somewhere on the wasteboard, place the touch probe on that block, have your work home there and work with X/Y offsets.
The offsets you can either set in VCarve (Edit/Job size and position/ Offset) or manually move the spindle over the workpiece X/Y, set your machine home X/Y on the touchscreen (on the right side of the screen next to the X/Y/Z position there are three buttons), and note the offset on a piece of paper.
Also, if you don’t switch off the machine X and Y stay the same, no need to probe. If you have to switch off the machine you just repeat the first steps to find the workpiece home.
The Z you have to probe manually with the paper method after every toolchange.
By the way, that is impressive! I hope the wasteboard is not mdf though?
Also if you are not familiar with the CNC I recommend cutting cheap material first, probably wood or foam are a good option. When I had complicated projects and expensive materials I used to make test cuts, although more and more I just go for it now.
If you use VCarve the preview toolpath button is your best friend.
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Hey, thanks for the response!!. My wasteboard is something called wedi board. It’s a waterproofing board I use in my industry. I then sloped it all to funnel the water to My drain hole which drains into a water contained and then gets recycled and pumped back out onto the workpiece
Slowly but surely I’ll figure it out.
Thanks again for the info!
Marble is pretty awesome. Have your tried anything else?