Does a 3/16 Ballnose save time?

[rickroy]

I have 5 signs to make with raster letters. The signs are entirely carved with the standard 1/16" ballnose bit. The carves are a little over 3 1/2 hours each on best setting. Have any of you used a 3/16" Ballnose tip and if so did it carve considerably faster? Was the quality acceptable? I changed the setting on "Board Settings" to 3/16 ballnose and uploaded the project (the machine doesn't know that I don't own a 3/16th yet!) but it doesn't appear to save any time at all. How can that be?

[zan29]

The best way to know if you save time is upload your mpc with the 1/16" and check the time it gives you and than change your mpc to 3/16" and upload again and compare.

[blhutchens]

I have found that sometimes when you save with 3/16 it doesn't show that it will save that much time. I had a very large tiled sign that was supposed to take 11hr total that carved in 7.5 hrs.
So, only on very large projects will you save that much time. You can really only use it on larger projects anyway because you loose so much detail.
Someone posted recently about using 2 mpcs to "rough out" first with the larger bit, then come back with the second mpc and the 1/16 to get the details.
I used a 1/4 in ballnose.

[rickroy]

The best way to know if you save time is upload your mpc with the 1/16" and check the time it gives you and than change your mpc to 3/16" and upload again and compare.

I did do this very thing and it saved ... wait for it ... 20 seconds on a 3 1/2 hour carve. I thought that the time savings would be a lot ore dramatic! LHR engineers are looking at it too. It is a little baffling. I am going to throw together another sign design from scratch listing the 3/16 ballnose at the start of the project just to cross some t's and dot some i's. I'll report the results right here.

[rickroy]

I have found that sometimes when you save with 3/16 it doesn't show that it will save that much time. I had a very large tiled sign that was supposed to take 11hr total that carved in 7.5 hrs.
So, only on very large projects will you save that much time. You can really only use it on larger projects anyway because you loose so much detail.
Someone posted recently about using 2 mpcs to "rough out" first with the larger bit, then come back with the second mpc and the 1/16 to get the details.
I used a 1/4 in ballnose.

Thanks. This is good validation of what I am experiencing and the exact information that makes this forum valuable.