After several years of on again / off again tinkering, I completed my first project! While I am thrilled that I had no sacrifice to the plywood gods today, I am wondering about my gcode. Here’s my completed cut:
I can tell that my setup was very “consevrative” - shallow depth increases, rough and finishing cuts, etc. The feedrate showing in gcode was 300. The cut quality seems pretty good, and I didn’t have a single issue over a 14 hour, 2 session cut. (Success!)
That said, I can’t imagine spending my weekends hovering for multiple days over a 2’x4’ cut. Can I refine my settings to accomplish these cuts faster without a big sacrifice in quality?
I suspect my Fusion360 setup is a part of the problem. Does post-processing come in to play as well?
shallow steps down, roughing and finishing passes, feedrate 300, all of these
mean that you go over everything many times and do it slowly
just eliminating the roughing step would cut the time in half, up your
feedrate to 600 and you roughly cut it in half again, try larger steps.
by the way, too slow a feedrate and and a shallow rouging/finishing pass result
in the bit being in contact with the wood a LOT, which generates heat in the
bit, dulling it.
you need to do some testing on scrap wood and work to get the feed rate and
depth of cut as high as possible.
If the router is producing dust, not chips, it’s going to be running hotter.
If you do any research on wood cutting feeds and speeds (what feed rate and rpm
should you use with a given size bit), you will find that the Maslow is at the
bottom end of the range (if it’s even close)
The recommendations are designed for production work, where you are trying to
get the best cutting that you can without dulling the bit too quickly (IIRC the
idea is to maximize your cutting speed without having to change the bit more
than once an hour)
so you don’t have to push all the way to thos limits, but if you end up too far
below the you have the heat problem from the bit just rubbing (chips carry away
heat), so looking for dust vs chips is a good criteria to keep in mind.
