V-Carving on uneven surface

Hi everyone, I am trying to V-carve a fair amount of text onto an uneven surface. It’s a piece of pine that was glued together but not run through a planer. It’s a beautiful piece, but I’m having an awful time with V-carving into it. Some places go deep while others hardly cut, or don’t cut at all.

Is there any solution for this other than dividing this thing up into 30 different jobs carving small amounts of text? Running Marlin, CAM is Estlcam, and controller is Repetier-Host.

Thanks,
Larry

Surfacing the entire board before carving is one solution.

You can do mesh leveling in Marlin, but you’ll have to wade through the documentation and reflash the board with a z probe set up. Once that was set up, you could do something like: G29 F0 B100 L0 R200 to probe 100mm in Y and 200mm in X. I haven’t tried it myself, but there have been some examples of people having success with that.

Otherwise, you can use a touch plate to make setting the Z easier. That might help you split up the job. If you added the right gcode to the start of every job you could make it move to a spot, let you set up the probe, probe there, remove the probe, and then do that single carve/letter.

Those are the “software” solutions. As Paul said, the hardware solutions are to either: 1) plane the top of the board with the cnc. 2) plane the board, and surface the spoil board with the cnc. 3) get a sharper V bit so the errors aren’t as obvious, and just live with the consequences.