I still have a lot to learn on the engraving part of the machine.
This was done with a 1/8" 45* End Mill.
I spray painted the pine black to make it easier to see what it was doing. It looks like I missed the middle parts of the letters. I created the text with Adobe Illustrator and used F-Engrave’s bmp import option.
High five!
That looks like a nice project. And, it will help you remember your name until you get your morning coffee.
I thought about engraving the wife’s name onto the broom handle… so she’d know it’s hers…
You better engrave her name on the house, the savings, the kids, and your paychecks if you do that. Divorce is not cheap!
Dude, If you did custom broom sticks at a craft fair you would be rich. The ultimate gag gift, I think I will send one to my older sister…Trust me, I owe her.
Nice work David. I plan to do quite a bit of engraving so I will be on this learning curve soon myself.
What I learned after some more reading is that F-Engrave works well for lettering and outlines, but I need to find something else if I want to engrave greyscale bitmaps.
I don’t have illustrator. But EstlCAM can read SVGs. I thought illustrator was similar to inkscape (vector graphics). I have used inkscape to make letters, saved as SVG and loaded into EstlCAM for carving.
I will say, if you’re using EstlCAM, a recentish update made carving a lot better. Especially if you want to hog out the middle with a flat bit. IIRC, I moved from 10.09 to 10.39 or something, and that stuff got way better.
I don’t have estlcam. I’m trying to figure out how to do this without buying more software.
It’s free, and extremely easy to use.
It’s free to use. It will just have a box that stops you for a wait whenever you save gcode. The wait time increases. I used it for like 6 months before I bought it. I ended up buying it just because I had used it so much, and felt guilty. The timer wasn’t enough to stop me, but it was a good reminder that I wasn’t doing anything to help.
fair enough.
I installed it last night. Now to figure out how to use it. All I want to do is try to get a greyscale image into a height map and then engraved.
I pretty quickly figured out how to do a B&W engraving.
OK. This is not working for me 
I can’t get estlcam to do an engraving that includes all the dark parts of a B&W logo/text. It seems to only want to do the outline.
I got F-engrave to do the full text including the filled parts of the letters, but then I had the feeds set all wrong and burned up my 45* end mill. I didn’t realize it tries to plunge to the full depth and doesn’t do a step-down path. It bored down into the wood and started smoking.
In EstlCAM if you want to do more that a line you should use carve, it allows for sharp corners and open spaces. I think if engrave as in I am attaching an engraver and it is just going to follow a line, that is how I use the drag knife and laser. Most anything else will be carve.
You should have a quick look through my videos or some old guy coding, or Christian from estlcam. We don’t have to many videos but I believe we have easily covered everything you might ever want to do with your machine.
I thought I tried carve, but it only did the outlines too. I’ll take a look at the videos and see where I went wrong.
Now I feel silly. Very first video I watch shows where I went wrong… I never made the ‘maximum width’ larger to fill in the open area.
I’ll get some more bits ordered and try again.
Don’t worry there is so much to learn, i am at it 12hrs a day and still always learn a new or better way to do things.
Also check the option for a pocketing tool or something like that. Making the pocket with the v bit will wear it a lot, and will take hours when a straight bit will do it much faster.