Question First project ever... engraving bottle openers

I've managed to get my Stepcraft 840/2 on the run and by absence of shaft mill tools for my Kress endmill, i started with my wood burning pen, engraving the names of my twins for their upcoming festivities...

I've made a mold from MDF where i putted the beer openers in and made a simple design in Aspire. The problem was at first that the design was double lined, so i manually stripped the design bit by bit to reduce the path to a single line.

Then a bit struggling with the uccnc setting to find the right Z-higth and soon, there were 30 bottle openers ready...

Not the finest piece of art, but the engraving tip was a bit too big and since this was my first-ever with a steppie, things look promising... if the Stepcraft is keeping it's manners....

VDH43, Good job.

Nice to see you solved the upcoming problems like a real hobbyist

A hint for you:
In aspire you can create text in 2 ways as scale-able text where you can change the setting or boxed where the size is determent by the size of the box.
Either in both choices you can select if you wish "true type" or "single line" text.



True type is mostly used by V-carving/Engraving toolpath and Single line is by Quick engraving toolpath.

When selecting single line you see ad the end of the textname 1L/2L/3L or 4L thes are the number of lines used per letter.



so select a 1L letter and save some correction time

Good luck and have fun with the steppie.

Yeah, i've noticed that, but since the beer openeres had to be engraved with the same font like the other stuff i had already, it had to be a specific font, which wasn't enlisted in the 1-2-line dropdown box.

VDH,

Another tip for single line fonts.
If you have a version of CorelDraw 4 or higher, it has a function available witch can create a centeline over the text you put in. So you convert true type text into single line text. Export/save as DXF or other format what Aspire reads and go.

I made some progression. I exchanged the wood burning pen for a router and tried various things from the Aspire software.
i still have an awesome lot to learn, but the first try-outs look promissing. Although... i tought they were. My stepcraft was working for 3 hours and all of a sudden it seemed like the zero-point was switched to another location, some 40 mm outside my stepcraft, so the router crossed the drawing and ruined everything.

I tried it again two more times, exporting the toolpaths again from Aspire with different settings (it was a v-carving toolpath with a pocket toolpath), with the same result : a ruined piece of work.

I immediatly started reading here and one of the suggestions was that Aspire and UCCNC sometimes struggle with combined toolpaths. And indeed, upon a closer look, the option 'combine all visible toolpaths to one file' was selected.

I just created a smaller workpiece without a pocket toolpath, and that ended wel... I'm hoping this will be the cure for further projects...

Any other explainations about a changing zero-point with UCCNC/Stepcraft/Aspire software? My axisses don't seem to struggle or miss steps and i do believe i have the right driver for my newly and recently bought Stepcraft 800/v2...