I’m stumped as to what is happening. I’m making a 7.25x26” sign. The first tool path is a profile with rounded corners. In the set up, the there is no offset, and I’m using the lower left corner with the touch probe. This is a pic of the cut when it started. The material is actually 7 5/16 wide. On the left side, the bit was about 1/4” away from the stock, and on the right side, you can see it was well within where I thought it whould be.
I understand that being much longer than wide, the touch probe probably didn’t sit square, hence the cut was not parallel to the side. But I can’t figure out why it was off on both sides. I tried another file on another sign, and had the same issue.
Is this a 1st carve on the machine, or a new issue that has surfaced? If a 1st carve, a few things come to mind. Is your machine assembled square on the table? Do you have a grid cut into the wasteboard, if so, is the grid parallel to both X and Y axis? It appears to me the workpiece when secured to the wasteboard wasn’t parallel with the Y axis. If your workpiece was oversized, not a big deal but it appears in this case that you were cutting to the maximum width of the workpiece. In this scenario, the workpiece has to be 100% parallel to Y. Where you set zero, lower LH or center shouldn’t have mattered. I personally use center most of the time because it makes layout of the design easier for me. I’ll “X” the material to find center, throw in a Vbit locate the center point on the material, set X and Y, finally put in the correct bit for the operation and probe for Z using the touch plate.
a touch probe that is not sitting square would not produce such a problem. Your workpiece is not aligned to your machine (not parallel to the axes). Possibly your wasteboard is not aligned too. Possibly you did not square the machine (your machine could be a parallelogram instead of a rectangle). You have to know that the instructions to square the machine in the older assembly video does not offer a method to accurately square the machine. In the new video for Elite Foreman assembly, there is now the reference to measuring the diagonal (great! )
As this is a gantry-type CNC machine with two separate Y axes, and it is often sold without a base but mounted by the user to a tabletop, before taking the machine into service, you have to make sure it is 1. rectangular (“squared”) and that it is 2. coplanar (not twisted), as explained here.
After that, you should position your wasteboard along lines you engraved with the machine itself (either by jogging around with the arrow keys or the gamepad while engraving a line of minimal depth with a V-bit, or by creating a 3D model of the wasteboard with a groove at the outer limits of the workarea and export this toolpath as a g-code program and run it one Onefinity CNC machine. With any of these options you achieve that the boundary of the wasteboard is parallel to the axes. While you’re at it you can also make a grid this way that helps you to align your workpieces parallel to the axes).
Thanks for the replies. I think I figured it out. I’m recently swapped my gridded waste board out for one that isn’t gridded. This is a new problem, so I bet not having the lines is the problem.
I’ll grid my new waste board out, check for square, etc, and try another sign this weekend.
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