Hi All, I am having a really strange problem with my Journeyman Elite. I am carving some Celtic crosses with fairly complex scrolls on the arms. The problem is that the depth of the carve reduces as it goes in the Y direction. I have surfaced the wasteboard immediately before carving and I have measured the level of the workpiece to be within 0.02 of an inch across the whole surface (7"x12"). I have also put a piece of paper under the taper bit at a mild friction and it is virtually the same across the workpiece. One sympton is that the taper carving bit does not carve as deep as the roughing bit carves leaving ugly pits in the middle of the scrolls. I am using a tool-setter to manage bit changes. Could there be a problem with thermal expansion somewhere as the less deep cuts are towards the end of a six hour carve? I am just about out of ideas if somebody has some.
Are you tightening the collet nut enough? Perhaps your cutters are slipping into the collet as you cut? Effectively shortening their length throughout the 6 hours?
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My Makita router had a bad factory collet that would loosen and drop the bit on higher IPM cuts
I replaced with a precision collet which seemed to solve the issue.
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I had a problem with the Makita collet previously so I have changed to an ER collet which seems to be reliable.
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