How fast can I make this go? How should I estimate cut time lengths?

[LumberGundam]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on some furniture designs and how to make my cuts as efficient as possible with regards to time management. I baby-sat my machine last weekend for an 8 hour cut into some 3/4" poplar core plywood. It was a bit much so I’m trying to see what kind of settings people are using for Fusion 360 and/or ground control to speed things up.

Here’s a snippet of my general settings:

• My feedrate was about 40 in/min.
• My cutting bit was 1/4" upcut bit
• My depths per pass was 1/8"

My machine felt slower than normal, but my time estimation on Fusion 360 was about 4.5 hours. Anyone have some settings to recommend or at least a fusion simulation multiplier to better estimate my cut times?

[md8n]

I tried to find that information when I first started as well.
The basics are - the maximum movement speed (X,Y) for a Maslow is 720mm/min (if memory serves me correctly), which is around 28+"/min - you can’t cut faster than this.
The Z speed is waaaaaay slower (unless you got one of the new ones), and that hugely impacts cutting speed if there’s lots of individual little cuts.
There’s also per line of GCode processing speed of the Arduino boards. The one I’ve got does around 10 lines of GCode a second (this is an *-ish sort of value). So if Fusion 360 has spat out a GCode command for every 0.1mm of cut (for example) - the Maslow is going to cutting at about 1mm/s (or 60mm/min), at which speed you’re basically just friction burning your way through the ply. The answer here is better GCode generation, or post processing.

[Arpcee]

I have found that the safe height for tool ( z axis ) needs to be about 3mm to 5 mm otherwise it slows the job down dramatically