Acrylic carving question

[mchurchf]

I made this as a gift and it turned out pretty good but in the letter M you can see the patterns made which I would like to clean up if I can. I used a .125 ballnose bit and cut .005 deep. Would a .125 endmill clean it up or is there something I can adjust in the profile settings? The M is yellow but for some reason in the picture it looks more red.

[mchurchf]

This might help

[tonydude]

What is your stepover on the ball nose bit? Mine is set at 8%.

Tony

[Eagle55]

A real sharp endmill type cutter might do a little bit better and possibly a slower feed rate might help (although with acrylic there may be a point at which the plastic begins to melt instead of cut if you go too low). Smaller step-over will also help but will drive your carve time up exponentially. To be honest with you I thought there was a strategy to the machine marks when I first saw it. I think it looks good. It adds a lot of depth. How did you get the appearance of two different colors, or is that an illusion? Nice project.

Roger

[mchurchf]

The step over is a 8% and the speed I think was 60 or 70 ipm. I might try and endmill on one and see what happens. I used two 1/4 inch acrylic sheets, one for blue and one for yellow. I used two sided tape to hold the acrylics together and cut the yellow, then pulled off the top acrylic and all i had to do was set Z with the touch plate. The X and Y was already set. I also used two sided tape to hold the Acrylic to the spoilboard.