Sorry if this has been asked and answered before but I can’t seem to find an answer. I have a project where my 60deg vbit carves just a bit too deep in certain fine line detailed areas of the graphic I am carving causing them to merge together. The majority of the carve is fine so I don’t want to limit the max depth in Vcarve for the whole project and end up with a flat bottom. My workaround so far is to use the touch plate to zero to the work surface. Then manually adjust the Z height to about 0.08 above the touch plate height and then re-zero the Z height. The project comes out fine then and the lessor 0.08 isn’t noticed on the rest of the carve. Is there a way to specify this in Vcarve to run the project at 0.08 above the work surface height? I don’t know if Vcarve will accept a negative number or if there is a better way to do this in Mach4. Thanks.
Hi Rick,
You need to create a separate toolpath for the part that you want to carve higher, and just set the max depth for that toolpath to be not as deep.
Corbin
Is your work surface flat and parallel to your machine bed? A Vcarve should go edge to edge between the two vectors you are carving within. The only reason I have seen them go past the line is if you material has variations or is not parallel to your machine’s Z height so that the Z height varies across its area relataive to where you set you Z height with the touchplate.
Yes everything is dialed in and flat. It’s not going past the line though. The lines are just close together and when the Vcarve goes to the standard depth it goes so deep some of them merge together. I was trying to avoid trying to do a separate tool path or use an engraving bit for the final detail in that section. I’ll probably just program a second tool path for that area only like Corbin suggested. It will just take a bit of work in Vcarve to close off some vectors but not a big deal. Thanks to both of you for the responses.