So I managed to cut several sheets of material and then on the fifth sheet the machine started, raised, and traveled to the first point and crashed into the spoilboard and stopped.
I figured that I must of skipped a step in the process but was not sure what I did wrong.
So I reset the machine, homed it, recalibrated the bed, measured the tool, and zeroed the material to be cut. See below image.
I can’t figure out the logic in the machine coordinates having a -10 Z? I think that may be my issue. Then when I go to start the toolpath the spindle goes up to 12 Z and throws the Z axis work envelope exceeded. I cannot figure out what is wrong in the settings.
No problem. There are one of two things causing this:
You have “prevent spoilboard dig in” selected in the wizard and you G code is trying to send the bit into the spoilboard. If this is the case, that feature is working as intended and it just saved your spoilboard!
The second possibility is that you have your Z offsets wrong.
If you haven’t already check out this video:
This will give you an understanding of how they work.
In a nutshell in your Set Part Zeros>WCS menu your Z offsets should all be positive numbers. A value of 0 means you zero’d to your spoilboard. A value of .75" means you zeroed to the top of a .75" thick piece of material. To say another way: Your Z value in the WCS table is the thickness of your material (if you are touching off to the top of it)
Another video that lightly covers this is this video:
I would highly encourage you to learn this rather than tossing your profile and starting over. If you do you’ll likely end up back in this situation. Learning how it all works is faster and easier!
Yes - I have refreshed myself on the videos and even gone back through the manual double check everything this morning. I feel like this is something not normal user error?
Did a fresh home, recailbrated the tool height setter, recailbrated the spoilboard, and ran the MTC utility. I put my sheet of plywood in place and was able to reference it and it shows up properly with positives in the WCS table - all makes sense.
I am now loading the g-code from Aspire that I have successfully cut before and hitting cycle start. It will show the render of the file to be cut and will immediately raise the spindle up to Z0 but then throws the Z axis work envelope exceeded. I cant figure out if that is because of a setting on the acorn wizard or something in my g-code. I did notice the Z height in the wizard default sets to -14.5 based on my 12" Z-axis travel height.
If you touched off to the top of your material it might have been .4896" thick and you likely commanded a .5" cut, so the “prevent spoilboard dig in” feature limited your Z travel to save your spoilboard.
Here’s what I would do:
Set “prevent spoilboard dig-in” to something like .06". In this scenario this would let you cut UP TO .059 into your spoilboard, give you a little room to through cut material, but not enough to destroy your spoilboard if you sent some badly setup G code to it.
You could also live dangerously and turn that feature off
Wouldn’t the better answer here be to use the surface of the spoilboard as the Z reference instead of the top of the material. That way the spoilboard is automatically protected and you don’t have to worry about the exact thickness of the material. The dig in feature might be good to prevent a gross miscalculation of the thickness of the material but but other than that I don’t see a lot of value of having it turned on.
This is the approach I use when I do sheet goods. I just set the Z offset to zero (so Z zero is the spoilboard) and set it the same way in Fusion/VCarve/Aspire
Me personally I still leave the dig in feature on and set to .06 because of this scenario:
If I accidentally send a job that is set to zero on TOP of the material, and I have the Z offset on CNC12 to 0, this will cause my bit to plunge into the spoilboard. I’ve definitely done this a few times.
Since CNC12 has decent lookahead a job that was setup that way wouldn’t even start because it would have seen the error.
Good point. There is no downside to that if you use the spoilboard as the reference and in the cases where you choose the wrong reference in the CAM it saves your butt. I have ruined more than one job due to that error.
