Touch plate question

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milo30
Posts: 553
Joined: Mon Mar 12, 2012 9:21 pm

Touch plate question

Post by milo30 »

I'm a little stumped right now. I am sure that the problem is something simple that I am over looking but I can't figure it out at the moment.
I bought a pen holder and wanted to give it a try. I normally use a touchplate to set my Z but I can't on this. I really wasn't sure how to set the tool up in vcarve so I just told it that it was a drag tool with a cutting depth of .005. I figured the spring would help compensate. I unplugged the touchplate and set my Z manually, ran a file and it started digging into the paper. Luckily this is spring loaded so I had enough time to hit the e-stop before damage to the tool occurred. I tried over and over with the same results. I then decided that maybe it thinks that the touchplate is being used so I zeroed it to the paper then raised it to .625 which is my touchplate setting, reloaded the file and hit run. Same results. The sharpie finally broke so I gave up.

I removed the tool, and raised the Z to almost it's highest level, zeroed it and ran an air cut test. It lowered itself probably .5 inches before it began running the file. After every attempt, I restarted the shark program, reloaded the file, rezeroed and even restarted the computer. I'm at a loss right now as to why it is doing it. I recently bought a diamond drag bit so I don't use the touchplate for it either and it is running perfectly, using the same tool settings. I've gone over the file and everything is correct in it, I have it at 40ipm and 5 for the plunge.

Anyone have an idea of what I am missing to keep it from diving too deep or have a better solution as to setting up a tool for it? Right now I am quitting for the day to think on it. I don't want to ruin the new tool...it is too expensive to waste. You can see from the picture, that the spring has plenty of play and it is taking all of that and still trying to go deeper if I don't hit the e-stop.

By the way for anyone looking at one of these tools, I have the shark pro and have the top of the dust boot mounted beneath the router. Using a sharpie the size in the photo might not work. It looks like the pen is too tall to have the clearance to spin freely. I don't think that it really needs to spin so I am going to try it sticking up beside the dust boot plate. Too much of a PIA to remove that plate every time that I want to use the pen and even then I haven't checked to see if I would have the clearance needed.
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4DThinker
Posts: 951
Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2012 9:00 am

Re: Touch plate question

Post by 4DThinker »

You can get a similar preview result using a pocket toolpath instead of a vcarve toolpath. You might try deleting the vcarve path for now and testing it as a pocket .005 deep. Use the same bit.

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