Bit too small?

I may know the answer, but just looks weird with how the edges aren’t even straight, I used a 90 degree .250 endmill and stopped it after the first too stars, is the star just too big for this bit? It’s a union for a 37" long flag so I think it’s 10.5" tall and 14.75ish wide

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Looks like you’ve got the angle for your bit set wrong in CAM. it should be able to handle a 90 bit. And as long as youe bit comes to a point, and it isn’t way deeper than it thinks, it should be fine.

Fusion or Estlcam?

Estlcam, after i stopped it because of this, I switched to a half inch 90 degree bit ive used on bigger stars before and it cleaned these up mostly, and the rest of the stars were fine,

edit,

ive used this same 90 degree .250 with the same settings on smaller (9x11 entirely) AZ flag for the stars, they were much smaller, but came out perfect, which is why i thought it might just be too small for these

More importantly, black and gold or blue and white?

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lmao, blue and white!

Your anchor, chain and letters look almost flawless. I would have to think it is the settings for your bit. I use 3 different 90 degree v bits for my stars and they look good.

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I would try to do multiple layers. Maybe it’s taking too much at once and the rigity of the machine isn’t enough

Yeah it does like 4 or 5 passes per star, it doesn’t try to take it all out in one go

Do you use 3 bits for the same stars? Or different bits depending on the size of your stars? Like your union stars look smaller that the star in the army logo so that was two different bits I’m guessing? Looks good!

A single bit should be able to do it but you have to limit the maximum depth and/or bit diameter in CAM so it doesn’t try to make too deep a V. And then you might need another strategy to clear out the inside. Very wide carvings can’t just go infinitely deep so it needs some clearing strategy either changing tools or abusing the point of the tool with a small stepover to hollow out the interior of the pocket.

Interesting I did notice that the bigger stars went deeper to clear it out, I’ll have to test with limited the depth and see how that works for me

I use different sized bits for different sized stars. I have a 1/4", 3/8" and a 1/2" bits. I run them in one pass and limit the depth to 1.5mm to 2mm depending on the size of the star. It took me about a week of trial and error in Estlcam to get it right.

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