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My nephew asked me the other day if I could do some 1911 grips for him, so found some 3d models of some blank ones and got to playing with designs. This is what I came up with.
Since my machine has been running pretty well and all my vcarve files have been working as they show on the preview, I went straight to trying it on some "good" wood. First step was hogging out the waste, which was done with a 1/4" upcut spiral, that worked as expected.
The finishing 3d paths using the 1/8" ball nose didn't seem to be cutting deep enough though, as I was seeing the steps from the 1/4" bit. I decided a second pass lowering my z axis may be in order, so setup for that.
However, the z axis appeared to have lost several steps right off the bat, eventually diving into the wood and snapping the bit.
This last run was with the dust boot removed, so other than perhaps I had it taking too big of a bite, I'm not sure what went wrong. I do have a smaller stepper on my z axis, so an upgrade to a larger motor may be in order.
I remounted the work after the last shot and tried running the rest of my operations to see if the hole alignments and cut-out was correct, but ended up losing steps on that bit also. Perhaps maple is a bit too hard, I did notice some similar problems on some white oak yesterday too.
I'll be giving this another try this week on some softer wood to see if everything goes as expected.
Since my machine has been running pretty well and all my vcarve files have been working as they show on the preview, I went straight to trying it on some "good" wood. First step was hogging out the waste, which was done with a 1/4" upcut spiral, that worked as expected.
The finishing 3d paths using the 1/8" ball nose didn't seem to be cutting deep enough though, as I was seeing the steps from the 1/4" bit. I decided a second pass lowering my z axis may be in order, so setup for that.
However, the z axis appeared to have lost several steps right off the bat, eventually diving into the wood and snapping the bit.
This last run was with the dust boot removed, so other than perhaps I had it taking too big of a bite, I'm not sure what went wrong. I do have a smaller stepper on my z axis, so an upgrade to a larger motor may be in order.
I remounted the work after the last shot and tried running the rest of my operations to see if the hole alignments and cut-out was correct, but ended up losing steps on that bit also. Perhaps maple is a bit too hard, I did notice some similar problems on some white oak yesterday too.
I'll be giving this another try this week on some softer wood to see if everything goes as expected.
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