Everybody should have a 5hp 4400lb vmc in their garage! Wonder what Mrs. Moose would do if I brought one home? Does it need 3 phase?
Jealous
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Iām with Moose here, incredibly envious. I donāt even have machines that nice at work, we just run a Hurco VM20i 3 axis and a Hurco VM10Ui 5 axis. The VM10 is so small I mostly use the VM20 and do stuff in more setups.
Though, I gotta ask, what circumstances made you say āYou know what, one Mori Seiki isnāt enough, I need twoā? xD
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The first one broke, and after spending 3 weeks with Mori Seiki and Mitsubishi and $9000, I found one on Ebay for $9000 (including shipping), so I bought it.
I am still working on fixing the first one in my spare time, of which I do not have much. 
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Thatās either a big garage or a small car
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Iām retired, you could just ship them to me 
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Ah, that makes sense. You always gotta have two, one to actually do stuff and one to fix 
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ā¦ And just to bring it back to the original engraving topic, here is the first prototype of the pendant Iām making
I have to work on making the border bigger, and choose a font that does not require tons of retracting, but itās working!
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look for a font thaat is a single line rather than double lines with space
between them.
David Lang
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Found this on bit size.
I was a bit surprised to learn that āspoilboard surfacing bitā is actually a category of tool, but leveling the surface with something like this might result in more consistent line width.
You might want an mdf spoilboard if you use that bit, and a well supported surface.
Because of space limitations the southerly Mooseshop canāt handle a maslow and Iām making do with a 3018 in a guest bedroom (dust control is very important to avoid Mrs. Mooseās wrath). Itās moving table was 0.3mm off over 30cm, solved by carpet taping 6mm mdf and surfacing it (I used pocketting in Carbide Create) in 0.1mm steps until the 1/8" bit went over the whole table. After that 0.1mm deep guilloche has had consistent line widths, and even a short 0.05mm deep test went OK. Doubt you could get a 4x8 Maslow spoilboard that flat, but you might be able to use a small area in the center
If my current 100w spindle could handle that bit it would be on order. Thanks for the link!
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That photo gave me the idea engraving thin lines would be a way to document the accuracy of our machines. A tool to work around the areas that are not as accurate. Also one way to do optical calibration.
We just tell Maslow we are going to engrave a ruler, Or a lot of rulers depending on the purpose. Engrave them right into the spoilboard. If you want to know the accuracy, hold your best tape measure/framing square up against the scale that Maslow made. If you engrave scales on the entire board vertical and horizontal, it shows negative error, positive error, how error changes with position, Z accuracy is shown by line width variations, all at a glance.
We want good contrast so start by painting the spoilboard dark, then what you machine away will be light. Or if you have a dark solid like HDPE, highlight with metallic marker.
Once zone based calibration is worked into the firmware, hopefully we can look at the grid and tell it āa little more left over hereā āa little more up over hereā. Then run the spoilboard machining bit to remove the skim coat with old engravings and run the ruler program when we want to try again. Thus creeping up on perfect calibration for each individual machine. If we have space on the controller to store any built in G code, I think those would be 2 good candidates, spoilboard surfacing and spoilboard scaling.
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