Running vacuum on super long carves

Accessories
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Long carves like this one give you a lot of time to think about why you decided to press the play button…

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Anyway, I had enough time to come up with a use for one of those random things lying around my basement…. Everyone has them, generally speaking, those possibly useful but unnecessary things that you’ve moved around out of your way a half dozen times and refuse to get rid of it even though you’ll probably never use it for anything kind of things. This one just happened to be an outdoor timer outlet. Fully adjustable in 15 minute increments, so I’ve been running the vac on for 15 minutes, off for 30 minutes. Very convenient and hasn’t missed a beat all day.

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That’s a great idea! Nice looking carving! Out of curiosity, have you seen any speed increase by running the detail pass diagonally?

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I honestly haven’t tried it any direction besides 45 degrees against the grain, and 100IPM. I’m sure I could speed things up a bit, but the surface finish has been great so I haven’t really seen the need to change anything yet.

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How do you get topo maps into your software so it can be carved like you’ve done?

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I haven’t made any carves yet, but I’ve used terrain.party in conjunction with “image2surface” plugin in Fusion 360 to create terrain models

@ANFhunter I’d love to hear your method too!

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I’ll have to look at those links and see if it’s easier than what I currently do, which is a bit tedious. I use TouchTerrain to download the terrain data, then import the mesh into Fusion 360.

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Great idea Chris.

Just a small caution for anyone considering this: your timer should be rated for an appropriate motor load, often noted in horsepower.

Really cheap timers are for resistive loads only like lightbulbs. Motor loads cause arcing during on/off so the components need to be heavier duty.

-Mark

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I wonder if anyone has done this with VCarvePro?

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I have learned that the USGS dataset that terrain.party utilized has been shutdown. Tangrams seems to be the next best option