Kirk Wallace wrote: > > If I were to do this, I would think about "What would I do if I were > routing this out by hand?". I have had little wood routing experience, > but it seems to me that there are issues with wood and shallow or slow > cuts. Also when coming up to corners, wood can tend tend to split down > the grain and you can knock the corners off. This can be avoided by > knowing which way to approach the corner, with either a climb cut or > standard(?) cut and looking for the run of the grain. I don't know the > best procedure, so you may have to just try a test piece. I would tend > to start by cutting all the path centers with as much depth as you can > get without splitting corners too much, then cut the sides but leave > enough depth and side so you can finish cut depth and sides with a final > pass. For the final pass you need to leave enough material and cut with > enough feed so that the cutter will actually cut and not ride over the > wood. On the other hand I have seen plenty of router cuts that were cut > in one pass. Hopefully the wood guru's here will chime in. > > You might want to do a search on "wood routing" on YouTube to see some > examples. > > Thanks Kirk, Steve and John for your replies so far. I will certainly take note of Johns comment about finishing cuts and add the option to specify a final finish cut depth (and width?) to my program. Indeed that was what I unconsciously did yesterday when testing the stiffness of my setup by cutting a perspex disc manually. Next stage is to tune the steppers to eliminate as much backlash as I can.
I do not intend to mill patterns only on wood although re-reading my post I can see I gave that impression. Certainly most work will be in mostly hard dense woods (thats what ornamental turners seem to like as they hold the detail). However I also intend to mill patterns in plastic and aluminum. I can envisage cutting a pattern into an aluminum or plastic ring which is then itself inset into the top of a wooden bowl (I can envisage it but can I make it!) So any comments about how to cut metals and plastics would be equally important to me. Thanks Alan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
