With a long end mill, such as the roughing mills, it would be possible to plunge right through the spoilboard and hit the aluminium cross rails of your Altmill. How many of you change the Z soft limit before a job to make sure the bottom of an end mill cannot go lower than the spoilboard? The default appears to be 170mm, which is about 70mm too low for the current end mill I’m using and the placement of my spindle. I just changed it to 100mm but was curious if this is something users worry about.
1 Like
Never even thought about that.
I review the file in vCarve/Fusion before loading in gsender and then again in gsender. It’s pretty easy to rotate the view in gsender to see if there are any deviations that would extend that far past the workpiece. Ive only once had a bit touch the 2nd wasteboard and that was due to some bug with gSender or the Altmill that caused my bit to continue to plunge downwards in the Z direction when I released my finger from the jog button on screen. Milling through both wasteboards and into the aluminum would have to be a pretty extreme error on my part which I expect may never happen.
But they can happen and setting a z soft limit is a simple and easy way to prevent damage from operator error.
1 Like
True. I guess I’m just not that concerned/can’t be bothered to set it per job. But it’s probably better to set the limit.