First try at vbit carving.

First try at vbit carving. Warped stock so the depth was all over the place.

That’s the way we learn… Good job !

Your own build?

For PCBs I got rid of the warped stock by writing

but obviously that wouldn’t work for wood unless you had a way of mechanically probing the height, then swapping tools.

What software did you use to generate your gcode?

Re: Software. I used Scorchworks f-engrave. Free and enough functionality for what I need it for.

Re: Warped stock. I could attach a test lead to the bit and cover the stock with some foil with light tack adhesive… Or just pull straighter stock from the pile…

@Glenn_West Yeah, it started out as a little Shapeoko unit with an arduino and a dremel. Replaced just about everything on it. Working surface is a little over 700mm sq. The spindle is just a disposable Harbour Freight trim router. Got some crazy cheap “you get what you pay for.” Chinese tb6560 based step driver, and LinuxCNC brains.

@Michael_Bridak_K6GTE thanks for mentioning F-Engrave. It looks like something we can use & available in Linux.

+Michael Bridak I’m trying to get F-Engrave compiled on my Ubuntu PC and it will run but can’t find my fonts. I tried to set up the preferences but fonts aren’t saved in one directory as they are in windows. How did you define where it should find linux fonts?

Hi @Jean_Lotz I placed my fonts in a ‘fonts’ folder in my home directory. But I ended up not using the fonts support in the end. I didn’t like the way it handled script fonts. So I use inkscape for all the font and graphic layout. Then export it to a PNG. Then use gimp to flatten the image and save as a BMP. Then import that into f-engrave for the vcarving to then export as gcode.

+Michael Bridak It is a convoluted effort but ok if it works. I’ll check InkScape out. Thanks.