After owning a handibot for almost a year and a half I finally got a chance to make some cuts today. Since my Y limit switch is out of commission, I hand zeroed x, y, and z.
I cut a piece that was 4 tiles wide using the large materials jig, and they came out mostly as expected, but I had 2 issues with z settings:
1) At the beginning of tiles 2, 3, and 4, I had to manually re-zero the z axis. Tiles 2, 3, and 4 started out "cutting" several mm above the surface of the material. At the end of each tile, the router would return to 0x, 0y, 20z. It seemed like the z zero was being reset at the end of one tile, or at the beginning of the next while the bit was still in the air, but I don't see any zz commands in any of the files, and in the demos I don't see people re-zeroing in between tiles, so I'm guessing the user did something consistently wrong. Any ideas what that might have been?
2) I did a series of pockets and one profile that was supposed to cut through the material and leave tabs. The material was 15mm thick, the pockets were at 4mm, 5,5mm and 7mm, and all came out correct. The profile was supposed to be 15mm deep, but was only cut to 12mm deep in all 4 tiles, with no apparent tabs. The previews in VCarve Pro and in the Shopbot control software looked correct: cut through the material with only tabs remaining.
Again, this was consistent across all 4 tiles, so again, something I'm consistently doing wrong. I thought I said "Yes, I meant to do that" to the "cutting deeper than your material" warning. Is there some kind of software limit/stop I might have missed somewhere?
Shoptime is a really rare and precious thing for me, so any help in getting this figured out before my window closes again would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-Dave
VCarve Pro v7.514
Shopbot Control Software v3.8.10