I took my M4 for its first test on what turned out to be an ambitious project for my skill. I was making a Black Knight costume for my 7yo and wanted to lay out the sword design in CAD and have the outline and some of the volume cut out by the M4.
I failed quite badly but I think I was able to diagnose each of the mistakes. Primarily I was unable to complete any of the cuts because of some combo of bit (Whiteside RD2100) and feed rate being too high. This caused various issues that caused the cut to go off track so I had to cut power and lost my progress.
I partly solved that but then made my tabs too thin (a few mm in clear poplar) and the combo of feed rate and small tabs caused the part to break loose and get thrashed. This affect one of the halves of the sword that I had planned to glue back to back. The other piece came out ok so I was able to cut some filler parts by hand and patch the gaps.
However, overall I was still able to get two halves cut out that fundamentally had the correct outline. This still saves a ton of hand shaping. There was a lot of other non-Maslow work that happened to get this costume together but wanted to share this reasonable success.
I did do the floating pin fix as well as gluing in the RJ45 connectors, but that was done from the start and I never ran the M4 without those fixes. I didn’t have any disconnections or reverse feed issues AFAIK.
I struggled a lot with CAD, tried all the recommended tools, and in the end I accepted some really basic Fusion SVG line outputs followed by cut setup in KrabzCAM. I would have liked to figure out a way to build a cutting plan from my 3D part so there is still much more to learn.
Edit: It was also not a small challenge to have the M4 cut this shape out from a poplar 1x4. This is what I had on hand from some (expensive) reno work and would give me the best finish since I wanted to have a sword-like profile on the blade and plywood wouldn’t work.
