I have worked on and off with CNC machines for 20 years. I THOUGHT I knew enough to be dangerous (perhaps that’s a good description for my hubris). I am making a simple whiskey tasting serving board for my son in law and found a font called Blacksword on dafont.com that someone on the CNC one had mentioned. It looks great until I try to mill it out. I’m making letters about .75 of an inch tall, with a 1/4” (6mm) v-carve bit, and it’s making numerous passes and no matter how “deep” I make the cut it’s not looking right. Perhaps I need a fatter bit, but even with the 6mm bit the letters look run together and muddy. Too fat. So I backed off a bit on depth and I then I get ridges in the bottom of the font grooves on the fattest parts of the letters.
I KNOW I’ve seen signs carved like this with similar fonts that look right. But I’m stumped at this point as to what I might be doing wrong.
I’m using GrblGru as my CAM, my home built machine, and a HobbyCNC driver board. Designing in Inkscape, and 6mm v-carve bits from Amazon.
In a nut shell, if I set the depth too deep it muddies the font and it looks all mashed together. Not deep enough and I get partially grooved letters that don’t look proper. I spent all day yesterday messing with settings and bits and didn’t get it worth a dime. Finally switched to a Hershey font and called it good. But I want to figure out the problem if I can.
Looking for some advice from the intelligencia here
Thanks!