carving centerline

[chebytrk]

Thanks for the info Dick and John. I'm going to try and play around a little more with the Vbits and see what gives. Maybe even setting up a txt carve with V90 and use the V22 and see how that turns out. At least as soon as I can get my "clear board sensor" solved. That one is still driving me crazy, but sooner or later something has to give. LOL

[dbfletcher]

For any given width of the stroke of a letter, the 90-degree v bit will cut shallower than the 60-degree bit. The 60 will cut deeper. If there were an option for a V22, it would cut deeper still. If you want to cut shallower, select a narrow stroke and use the 90 degree v bit.

Attachment 65552

That is probably the best diagram I have seen so far on how the bit size affects centerline depth. Nice job!

[DickB]

Thanks Doug!

One could probably get the clearest lettering by using a single-stroke font, like this one: http://www.onelinefonts.com/index.ph...roducts_id=240. I don't know if this particular font would give good results with Designer Centerline. It would be nice to try. Actually if one used a font where the width of all lines was the same, and lines ended in a round, not square, end, that should work. Like this one: http://www.dafont.com/comfortaa.font. You could assign a 90 v and swap a v22 with no distortion.



Compare this font to Times New Roman. See the white tool path little stubs at the ends of the T. Those will cause distortion if you assign one V bit and use another. Comforta doesn't' have that and should carve cleanly.

I thought about making an alphabet similar to this by drawing vectors - the letter I would be one line, L two connected lines, d a line and a circle, etc. You could then assign any bit and depth to these vectors. But it would be a bit tedious to make the alphabet in the first place and to copy and paste letters into words and sentences.

An advantage of a narrower bit for small text is that because the narrower bit will cut deeper, the text is less sensitive to surface variation. If the board is not perfectly flat and even thickness, or if there is a small error in locating the board's surface, very small text with the 90 v can easily fade or disappear. That is one reason I regularly use the 60 v for small text.

[dbfletcher]

I typically use Inkscape to render hershey typefaces (single stroke fonts developed in eh 50's I think). Then i export to dxf and use the dxf imported to get in it to carvewright. I most did this so i could accurately align my text to a path before bringing it to designer. I blieve things are better on this front these days with 2.0, but since my method still works fine, and I don't have 2.0, I haven't bother to change my habits yet.

[DickB]

Had to give this a try. Comforta bold font, Designer 2, font size 16 pt (the smallest designer 2 will allow to be input), letter spacing 6, 60-degree bit assigned and used on MDF.



I predict if a V22 bit were swapped in, the lettering would look the same but the cut would be narrower.