What I see in Designer, is Not what I Get...

[pruitts]

I received my machine last week and after carving out a couple of quick signs of my kids' names in Pine, I decided to try something a little more involved. I live the Chicago area and given the current status of the Bears, I opted to try to come up with a nice Bears sign to show off at work among all of the bandwagon fans.

I imported a bears logo into Designer. I placed the logo, the word Bears in large letters and the words NFC Champions in smaller letters, into a recessed carved oval. In Designer it looked great; the detail of the logo was also coming through quite nicely. I set the bit optimization to Best. Uploaded the design to the memory card using the High quality setting. I then pulled out a nice piece of 0.5" Oak and let the machine carve away.

The photos below show the results. The detail of the logo was horrible. Most all of the smaller text letters were chipped away. I purposely used Oak to have the design look much nicer and to prevent chipping.

I can somewhat understand the smaller text breaking. However, seeing the detail that others have received doing different carvings, I didn't think I was asking too much. Plus, I kept the depth of the smaller text shallow on purpose to prevent the wood from breaking away. The bigger disappointment was the look of the logo. What I saw in Designer, is Not what I got from the machine...

I have attached my design and 4 photos to ask for your help. The first three photos show the original sign. The last photo shows part of the sign redesigned with 'rounder' small text (to try to prevent breaking of the text). Notice two things in the last photo. 1) the smaller text still chipped away. 2) The sign is not finished - I received a Z Axis Stall error and the machine shut down. (It's currently on its way back to Texas for service, since troubleshooting with Chris in support couldn't get it running again.)

I would appreciate any feedback and suggestions that you can provide, such that when I get the machine back, I can be better prepared to produce a nicer sign.

Thanks in advance!