Here are my first three test results with Aspire’s Dovetail Gadget.
No 1. Plunge Rate: 9 ipm, Feed Rate: 36 ipm
Result: Much too fast. Some issues with chipping around the edges of the material when cutting the pins. After some gentle sanding they did fit together nicely, but as you can see there were some gaps.
No. 2. Plunge Rate: 5 ipm, Feed Rate: 27 ipm
Result: Much too slow. Some burning of the material and I broke an endmill. I used a 1/8" fillet on the pins as well as tails and it is as you can see quite noticeable. Again, fit together well, but still gaps.
No. 3. Plunge Rate: 7 ipm, Feed Rate 27 ipm
Result: Still a little slow. A little burning but everything came together very nicely. I changed the the fillet to 1/16" which looks much better. I went ahead and glued it together, and as you can see it is starting to look like the real deal.
Overall: I think the plunge rate should stay at 7 ipm, but the feed rate can go up a little to prevent burning, 29 ipm, I believe, would be right on the money.
All feed and plunge rates pertain to the cutting of the pins. Cut the Tails with the feeds and speeds that you normally would.
This is untreated Pine BTW.
is it a small bit or really weak Z axis?
Well, it cuts all the way through the material with each pass, so the depth per pass is .75. I had to slow it down a lot to compensate.
I have a 1000x1000 ox with 1/8" steel plates. 1/8" three flute down cut end mill.
oh that explains it then. Why not do multiple passes? Less tear out then.
It doesn’t give the option. I think vectric assumes that you have a tank of a machine.
You could punch in a different material thickness and run multiple jobs each at a different thickness. Sounds like a pain but it would allow you to do shallow cuts.
Not a bad idea. I’ll test that out and report back.
So, aspire defaults to the depth of the material. It will not allow you to adjust depth. You can set the material to a shallower depth but the width of the cut will also be that dimension. so 1/8" cut will go a depth of 1/8" but also with a width of 1/8". So… when you go to cut the next depth at 1/4" of an inch you will take a full 1/4" out of 1/8" of the material and so on and so forth.
TLDR: Cannot cut multiple shallow depths.
Bummer.
Someone needs to create a program that uses this same idea, but allows you to cut at multiple depths.
This gadget is based off of this program available at github:
Any programmers in the house?
@K.T_Tanner-Mennenga wow that’s a bummer and sounds like a serious flaw in the software. Can you export the dovetail as an svg? If so you can use another program to create your Gcode.
@Matt_Herrera Well, the flaw is with the toolpath generator not the vector. I’m thinking at this point a solution would be to create a 3d model of the dovtail pin and mill it as a 3d toolpath.
Doesn’t have to be 3D. Just do a contour cut. If you set the drawing up
with equations you can easily edit the model with various angles/widths/etc
