first time 3d carving

I am trying out the long board/sign jig for the first time and decided to try 3d carving for the first time. I just picked a weave pattern to go around the boarder and used mdf for the first time just to see how it goes expecting to have to make some adjustments and just curious if you could give any hints. I made some large wedges out of 1/4" mdf that I designed to go under the cutting material from the front and back to hopefully hold it level and solid but I noticed I had some issues with the material just a tad off level and it also had a little bit of give to it. Tonight I used some tape to shim the sides of the wedges that were down a little to level the material and was able to make it not give hardly at all now. While it was cutting this piece today I also noticed the sides were moving up/down a tad so thinking that might also be a small problem I made another set of wedges that go in from the sides to hopefully hold them from moving. Here is what I have now that it says that its done but it looks like there is almost another layer that it just did not take off, but I wasn't sure if it was just from the material moving?

Does the preview in VCarve show the material being removed? It looks like you've got it set to cut "to model boundary" which means the cut will not go through the gaps in the weave. To fix this you need to create a vector boundary around your model and select the "machine to selected vectors" option in the toolpath. In the "modelling" tab on the left side of the screen, there is a button for just that purpose. It will create vector boundaries around all the edges of your model. The vectors come in as a group -- to select them individually, you'll need to right click them and select "ungroup". When you go to cut the pattern, just select the vectors that mark the outside and inside edge of your pattern. This will create the same toolpath but also flatten out the gaps in the weave.

Here's the file where I tried it out: [www.dropbox.com]

in the preview it shows it all being removed. The "cut to boundry" area is a bit confusing for me and I could not seem to find much info on what the different types meant. Playing with the different settings now I can see a little bit of the difference between them. Is there a link you could direct me to that explains them? I see what your saying about the center of the weaves. I switched it to "machine to selected vectors" like you said but I must still be missing something.

I tried to make mine act or look like yours but could never get it to look or work the same. I ended up taking yours and then adding to it to complete it. This project was all under the idea of figuring out the long board/sign jig and getting my feet wet and learning a little bit and I can say that it was successful in that aspect. The wedges I made and now shimmed up seem to hold the material nice and flat/level and doesn't allow the material to move anymore. I learned I do not like my V-bit, and I need to make sure the material is properly seated against the front all the way, and I need to be sure to both label my files differently enough that its easy to tell them apart and be sure the proper file was loaded up when I thought it was. How can I delete the previous jobs I ran so they do not end up back into the file to be cut? This was my first time working with tiling and the multiple files that it uses and at least one time I thought it fed the next tile into the system only to notice it was a different file. I will have to make it longer next time to get the perspective correct on the name as this time I was working with a piece of scrap length and wasn't sure how much I needed to leave on the ends.

I believe that you can look at your job history and permanently delete files from there. I think that the job management is an issue with FabMo that we need to tackle. It should require you to "overwrite" an existing job when you import one of the same name -- too confusing otherwise.