note: I’m receiving errors trying to upload the gadget file either as vgadget or zip. I will try again in follow-up posting.
If you V-carve with any regularity, you’ve probably hit this: a bit that’s labeled 90° that doesn’t quite carve like a 90° bit. Corners bow, edges drift, inlays don’t seat. The bit isn’t defective — it’s just not the angle on the label, and your software doesn’t know that yet. Finding the true angle has traditionally meant trusting a spec sheet, owning a goniometer, or working through trial and error on real stock. None of those are great options at the bench.
This gadget is my attempt to solve that problem completely inside Aspire and VCarve Pro, with no measuring tools beyond your own eyes. It walks you through a six-step dialog flow — stock setup, tool selection, angle parameters, machining parameters — and generates a calibration test series directly in your active job. You run it on a piece of scrap, read the result visually, and update your tool database. Start to finish: one bit, one Z-zero, one short cut.
The gadget uses two complementary methods side by side. The primary method is a circle/arc comparison: for each candidate angle in your test series, a peck-drilled hole is paired with a shallow engraved reference arc calculated for that exact assumed angle. When the assumed angle matches the bit’s true angle, the arc bisects the drilled rim precisely — centered on it. Too shallow an assumption and the arc sits inside the rim; too steep and it sits outside. The geometry is governed by straightforward trig, and because the arc and drill share the same XY center, any local Z variation cancels out — the comparison stays valid even on an imperfect spoilboard. The optional second method is a triangle V-carve: a 30-60-90° triangle carved alongside each circle. Straight sides and clean corners mean the angle is right; bowed sides and overrun or underrun at the acute apex mean it isn’t. Both methods run from the same series of angle steps, on the same piece of stock.
The gadget generates three to five toolpaths automatically: a profile pass for the reference arcs and stroke-font labels, a peck-drilling pass for the ground-truth holes, an optional cleanup pass, and an optional V-carve pass for the triangles. Step count, step size, orientation, label format, drill depth, peck increment, and retract behavior are all user-configurable. The gadget remembers your settings and window sizes between sessions.
This is a beta release — Ver 0.9 — and I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from anyone willing to put it on scrap. It has been tested end-to-end in Aspire v12 on Windows. If something doesn’t work as expected, or if the results read differently than the instructions suggest, I want to know. A download link and install instructions are attached below. Drop your results, questions, or suggestions in this thread.
FOOTNOTES — For the technically inclined
[1] On the triangle method and where it comes from
The triangle V-carve method isn’t original to this gadget. The foundational insight belongs to Paul Z, a long-standing member of the Vectric community, who posted it on the Vectric forum on September 18, 2007, in a thread titled “Checking V Bit Angles” (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2164). His post described a practical problem — a bit labeled 90° that wasn’t carving cleanly — and a neat solution: a triangle toolpathed at a series of angles around the nominal, cut in scrap, read by eye. In his words: “The ‘85’ cut shows what happens when the bit angle is larger than the toolpath bit angle. Notice that the corners are bowed out a little and that the top edge looks bowed up.” Simple, direct, and still exactly right.
That post was effectively rediscovered by a wider audience a decade later when Peter (CNCnutz) made it the subject of Episode 151 of his YouTube series in June 2017 — “Test your V-bits angle” (youtube.com/watch?v=NugdOnwnnPY), with an accompanying write-up at cncnutz.com. Peter’s video introduced downloadable test files and made the method accessible to a much broader audience. His post is characteristically generous in its credit: “A big thanks to Paul Z who 10 years ago posted in the Vectric forum and shared a technique for testing Vbit angles.” That’s the right spirit, and I’m following it here. Paul Z originated the technique; Peter popularized it; this gadget automates and extends it.
The adaptation in this gadget changes the triangle geometry to a fixed-width 30-60-90° shape — three distinct corner acuities instead of the original’s near-symmetric angles — and generalizes the test from fixed-angle files to a fully parametric series centered on whatever your nominal angle is. The triangle method is paired with the circle/arc comparison, which I developed separately as a more precise single-threshold read.
[2] On writing the gadget itself
I came to this as a CNC user first and a programmer a distant second. The Vectric gadget SDK is well-designed and surprisingly capable, but the documentation has gaps that only show up at runtime — which is where the real learning happens. A few things worth passing along to anyone else who wants to try gadget development:
The Lua BootCamp video series by James Anderson (VCarve GadgetMan) at jimandi.com was the most useful starting point I found. His site also hosts the Vectric Lua Interface Documentation as a web page, which is considerably easier to navigate than the SDK PDF. The existing open-source gadgets — particularly Box Creator and Easy Pencil Box Maker (JimAndi5000 / Sharkcutup) — were invaluable as working architecture references. The dialog window size persistence pattern in this gadget is adapted directly from Easy Pencil Box Maker; credit where it’s due.
The gadget is written entirely in Lua and HTML, distributed as a standard .vgadget file, and is free. Source is available on request.
Tags: vectric aspire vcarve #gadget v-bit #calibration #toolsetting
