how thick of a wood can I cut on the longmill ? I am trying to cut out a circle 12" diam from a piece of stock 1.5" thick I zeroed XYZ on the top of the piece front left corner but when I try to run the G-code I get a soft limit warning that my cut excides to travel limit. I have no problem cutting .75 thick stock out.
Robert
The longmill’s z travel is around 4.9". You should be able to cut 1.5" of wood, but an incorrect setup will prevent that. There are a few factors at play here:
Length of bit: If you have 2" of the bit extending beyond the router (reasonable for this cut), you will need 3.5" of the 4.9" of travel just to do the cut (1.5" for the wood; 2" for the bit above the wood). That leaves you with less than 1.5" of extra play which may exceeded by:
Placement of the router/spindle in its mount. If you can lower your z down and cut into your waste board with your current set up, then that is also eating into your 1.5" of extra play. You may need to raise where your router sits in the mount. Of course, you still need to be able to cut through the piece, so you can only raise it so high.
The distance your gcode raises the router at the home position and during non-cutting movements. This setting is called “Machine Safe Z” in Carveco; not sure in other software. I ran into your problem once when mine was set to 2" - that would make your cut impossible (1.5" for the wood + 2" for the bit + 2" for the raising and lowering the bit). Lower this value to as small as you can make it while still being safe (to avoid clamps, etc).
thanks, I had a feeling about the bit length, but wasn’t sure if it was possible to cut that deep, I’ll try those suggestion and let you know how I make out