CNC HELP

[john b]

I've been fabricating 25 years I feel i know stone. What I find frustrating is not knowing how to work stone now that I have a CNC machine. I understand there is a learning curve and everyone goes thru it but there has to be a general rule for certain materials. What diamonds can I skip on what materials? These are a few of my questions I need help with, so iJf anyone would be willing to give me a few minutes of their time this would certainly help me start enjoying my machine. Just trying to save some time.Thanks

[matt rickard]

John what kind of tooling are you running now? Is it high speed? Are you polishing on the cnc? I can't imagine skipping any diamonds cause you will just make the next tool in line work way to hard and really decrease the life of that tool.

Get you some Terminators and set back and watch your machine work for you

[ash20ash]

Yep on what Matt just said.
What other specific things are you looking for?

I have been running one for about 2 months. This could be a good post for me also.

[john b]

Hey guys thanks for getting back to me. What I was refering to was I wasn't sure if I should use the blade breaker on certain materials such as carrara, crema marfil . Thought it would damage the stone. Do I slow the speed down on what materials? these are some of the questions I have. Eric called me today and helped out ,if there is anything any tips you can give it's always appreciated. Ash and Matt I've been following your posts and thanks again, just trying to learn the machine with different stones. By the way I do use Terminator and want to see how good they really are.

[Camzl1]

I talked to John today as I was driving home from the last leg of my trip. Mostly here is a recommendation from my experience.

On most all stones we would conventional cut so 90% of the standard issue granite is fine doing it this way. However we were adamant about putting relief or escape cuts in the programs to virtually eliminate blow-outs. Now on fragile material we always would climb cut (profile tools run clockwise). Only speaking from experience and with the software we had it was very easy to add these in your program without modifying the drawing at all. So our practice was to place relief cuts into any end that had over a 1/4" over-material on the straight runs, and relief cuts in the radius that were larger than 1.5". Never had a blow-out unless the programmer forgot to do this or didn't cut the material the proper direction.
The safest way for beginners is climb cutting everything. This will not be a thread on conventional or climb cutting. They both have their places in the scheme of things.

You can pretty much run your diamonds on any material. No worries and do not skip or leave out a step for this is the way they are optimally calibrated. Now as far as marbles go I typically run the rougher and segmented D1 at 80% programmed feedrate and then the rest including polish 100%.

There are some rules for the resin style polish wheels, but very simple ones.

1. All granites = OK
2. Most marbles = OK If it is borderline travertine don't use them.
3. Engineered stones = OK. Run positions 5 & 7 only to better match the shine of the face. All 3 and too shiny. Your
choice.
4. Travertines = some but not a lot, Dark and Light emperador and the likes of polished travertines, these we have had
no issue. New jerusalem Gold, Walnut, Cordoba, or anything that is going to require you to fill in the pores with
kemi or grout, don't run the polish wheels. For one there is no need to, since the material has to be finished by hand
anyway and these materials that are real porous, debris can scratch and gouge the polish wheel.

That's all I have but Also Matt called me and said that Cosmos can do it also and happened to them. So also be careful with those micah heavy stones. We had good luck polishing on the machine, but it can happen.