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View Full Version : A few questions about Carvewright



Dennik
01-09-2007, 02:03 PM
I haven't bought it yet, but i'm very interested in affordable prototyping, cause i'm professionally into computer graphics and i'd love to own a machine that can recreate in real life what i design in the computer.

So i have a few questions.

1)Whats the accuracy - resolution of the carving?
2)I read somewhere that it has a depth resolution of 256 tones of gray. Could it be possible to continue carving the same piece seamlessly by adding a second gray scale image to get twice the depth resolution?
3) What file formats does the software support - import?
4)Whats the thinnest layer you can carve? Is it possible to create complete cutouts or do they become unstable near the end of the loop?

Thats all for now. Thanks in advance for your time.

BobHill
01-09-2007, 02:26 PM
It probably would be easier for you to ask exactly what you are looking for the CW to do, but yes, it is extremely accurate. It'll accept only RASTER images for carving (at least at this time), so you might create the design in something like CorelDraw, Adobe Illustrator, Xara, etc. or even AutoCad, but you'd have to convert it to a raster (JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG, MNG, XPM) and best then to work it in something like PhotoShop. If you divided your raster image into "parts" then yes you could use an 8bit shades of grey to each section, but you can't increase the resolution, nor would that be of much use since the cutting depths are limited to 256 steps set to the depth of the object with maximum depth being 1" regardless of option for wood thickness (up to 5"0).

The minimum size wood (or carrier) is 7" long, 1½" wide, and 1/4" thick. For best quality cutting/carving, it's best to leave 3½" on each end with no cutting or carving so the wood is always under the rollers. That would ordinarily be a wasted 7" each time, so a sled/carrier which is designed to carry your carving/cutting wood which would be less than minimums is what is not only practical, but almost a must for those of us who often do require such. I often need to cut parts on a 24" x 3" x 3/32" thick wood and I prefer not to waste any, so one of my sleds is 31" long, 3" wide, and 1/2" thick which makes my design piece 31" x 3" x 19/32" (remember you don't have to convert fractions to decimals, as the machine will do that for you). Tack the working wood to the sled by double sided tape (not the heavy carpet type or you'll have a problem removing the parts) or a glue stick (temporarily not bad, but don't leave it for any long period of time).

Bob Hill
Tampa Florida