I am attempting my first milling operation and I am stumped. Last night I had my holes all setup for my spoilboard out of 3/4 mdf and all was going well from sketchup to estlecam to repetier. The idea was to get the process running and then stop it and finish it up in the morning since it was late almost midnight and I wanted to go to bed.
When the bit cut the first three holes I noticed that the cut was not going all the way through the mdf, I have the mdf elevated on some shims so the bit wouldn’t cut into my laminated board on the bottom. When I noticed my cut was not going all the way through I killed the print and thought to resume the next day. So far these are the issues that I am running into.
How do I get back to the correct starting point like I had before???
I tried bring the bit over the first hole and made that my zero so I could print in mid air just to be on the safe side. Well I ran into another problem where the X and Y axis would move into position but the movement for cutting the circles wasn’t working anymore.
I thought something was wrong with the machine, a loose wire maybe but then I remembered that I had the same issues when I was trying to carve the crown in the tutorial. I loaded up the test crown gcode that Ryan has on the site the see if there is indeed something wrong with the machine. Well, the crown started printing in mid air with all the correct movements.
This leads me to believe that there is something I am not doing right when it comes to Estlecam. I uploaded my estlecam profile if anyone can take a look and see what I am doing wrong. Appreciate any help as its horrible to be stuck when you first start.
Thanks for the response. After spending all day trying to figure out why the machine was not milling anymore I finally figured it out a little while ago and was able to stand there for about 30 mins while it was making the spoil board. It seems that the settings that I put into the program when I first set everything up seemed to have taken a life of its own and disappeared.
I went over the setup pages again when setting up the machine and saw the few options that were missing in Estlcam, once I put those settings in everything started working normal again. I saved the settings again and again just to be safe.
I also had to eyeball the bit to see where it was and really trying to get it centered, once I did that it all went well. From this experience I am going to have to write down my coordinates everytime I do a print now.
It depends. If your work home is the center of the stick, then probably, yeah. I just take a quick photo of the screen. Used to write it on the corner of the stock.
I like to use the lower left corner of my stock whenever I can, because that way 0,0 can be the machine home.
Tony let me ask you this. If I am milling a piece of whatever material and I want the bit to start on the corners and start rounding the stock, is it just a matter of setting x, y and z to zero and click print. I am still learning this stuff that I thought was easy.
Good chance i don’t quite understand the question, so feel free to add more if this doesn’t make sense.
Generally, you’ll home the machine (if you have dual endstops) and know where 0,0 is. Without dual endstops, folks usually resort to some type of blocks while powering up to ensure that the machine is square, and the known location is still pretty good fo a known 0,0.
From there, you can locate the stock at the known point, or MAKE another known point (say 10,10 as an example) that you can send the router to and know where your stock is. Set 0,0 with g92 or the menu in the software (which is just g92). Set the z to the appropriate 0 with your probe (usually top or bottom of the stock).
Alternative, locate the stock anywhere and jog the machine to wherever you want your work origin to be and G92 xy for 0,0. This is where the sideways probing would be helpful if it weren’t so much easier to just use a known location. Generally, i only do this with unknown (repeated jobs i dont want to measure every time) or irregular(non rectangular) stock where i need to start from the job center. Set your z appropriately.
Once the cncs work origin is the same as your cam origin, you should be good to go.
Rounding stock corners can be tricky if you need to go all the way around, because you have to allow for work holding (clamps etc).