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I guess I'll have to do some machine timings. But I believe the practical cnc router is accurate. ernie

Dennis, My old router would hesitate with everyblock so it never achieved the set speed. It would max out and high rates were only achieved with single large moves. Smaller moves really slows it down. The new one looks ahead 10,000 blocks so it never slows down. It flys along at the...

I'll have to look into Gerber bits, I bought some for V-cutting but I never tried their end mills. With feed rates of 300 ipm they must be good. ernie

Mike, The Rosberg MDO seems to be much harder than it used to be. What brand bit are you using ? The Enco bits are designed for metal cutting but they have always worked well in the past and they cost about 1/3 of wood router bits. I will buy more expensive bits if they will hold up...

Mike, I've been using ENCO solid carbide double edge spiral upcut bits. I make 1/4" deep passes while cutting the outline of MDO. The bits are sharp and not burning the wood. After a 10 or 15' they snap. On my old router I would always use 1/8 bits now I'm even breaking 1/4" bits. I...

My new router is so much faster that I have been breaking bits. Of course sign foam is no problem, but cutting out 3/4" MDO has been causing my carbide bits to break. What speeds and feeds works best for you? Does anyone have a favorite cutter design for MDO? ernie

Ernie's wife Diane here. When we are trying something new on our router we will route some of the blue foam insulation you get at the lumber yard. It is cheap and routes nicely. No sense wasting some expensive HDU!. You can flip it over and use the other side or reuse both sides. Diane

I just wanted to report that putting diagonal crossed tensioned cables on the router along with clamps on the leveling table has fixed all my issues with the router table vibration. I'm going to mount a tv camera on the router head next, this will allow quick alignment to the LL corner of...

It's the time in England at the prime meridian. So we are 5 hrs behind in the EST zone.

I'm thinking of writing a program that modify's the g-code file to accomodate the substrate surface height variations. In practice I would mount the substrate on the vacuum table then measure the z height every 6" with a touch sensor. This data would be input to a post processor that...

We could use a surfacing bit to achieve a flat surface on the sign but we like to paint the sign first then apply paint mask and rout it. At this point we prime and sand the letters. Next we gold leaf then peel the mask for a finished sign. ernie

When V-cutting signs I often find problems with non flat substrates. A shallow 150 degree cutter really gives me problems with variations in the letter width. Often I wind up shimming the substrate to get it flat. How about some tricks to make cutting easier? The obvious one is to use a...

low cost router The total cost was under $10k for a 5'x10' router. I bought the kit from practicalcnc.com The vacuum table I built myself, and the CAM program is from Rams3d.com. The system is lightly built and I have started to modify it for better performance. It is faster than my other...

finished router This shows more of my homebrew vacuum table.

Router kit This is the router as shipped.

I may have mentioned getting a new low cost router. Here is a picture. I hope.....

Corel 12 is great. They added a lot of drawing features that you find in CAD programs. Autofeature recognition works suprisingly well. You sketch a circle and it converts to a real circle. The program recognizes 20 different sketched objects. ernie

Dave, I think the software is called Profilelab. I have to believe it is much improved, I looked at Signlab 5 or 6 years ago and V-carving files were very slow to generate. It seemed at least 10X slower than Casmate was. I remember thinking I wouldn't live long enough to run a complex...

Talking about Cutters ...V-cutting is always a pain. As far as I know the Gerber software makes multiple passes with the V-cutter. So they only sell small V-cutters. Other software just leaves uncut areas in the center of the biggest letters. The large cutters will allow me to cut...

I don't know about books on routing, but cutting tool speeds and feeds info can be found http://onsrud.com A google search for CNC routing will turn up some interesting sites. ernie