Hey all!
Trying to do some testing with a drag knife, and I’m unable to disable the spindle spinning.
Tried setting it on the controller, within vcarve, and the old potentiometer on the front of the cabinet- none of them allow for 0 spindle rotation it seems.
Are you generating gcode from vcarve? You can delete the spindle on command by editing the gcode in a text editor
I experimented with a drag knife before, and the only way I found to do this was what Michael suggested: remove the spindle start command from the gcode file manually in a text editor. Definitely a nuisance – and extremely frightening if you forget!
In Vcarve there is a tool for the drag knife. I think it is under special tools? It should in theory delete the spindle start command. I would test that with an air cut just in case.
I have used this in the past on 2 different routers and it works. I have not tried it with this particular router.
M3 is what you need to delete in the G-code
Yeah, that tool/wizard is how I launched a drag knife across the shop last night, lol. Unsure why it doesn’t behave as expected.
Thanks everyone for your replies! I’ll be back to try manually editing the gcode when I have a replacement bearing….
The Vcarve tool gives you an appropriate drag knife toolpath, and it puts a command to set the spindle speed to 0 in the gcode, but it still issues the “spindle on” command after that. That would be fine on many CNCs. But one of the few things I dislike about the Laguna CNCs is that we can only make them acknowledge eight specific speeds, and 0 isn’t one of them. There’s a thread on here a year or two ago where I requested 0 be made one of the allowed speed settings for precisely this reason, but then that leaves only seven real speeds.
So the speed 0 command is ignored, then the spindle is turned on at the default speed. And a drag knife at 18,000 rpm is one of the scarier things I have seen in this shop.
Safety seems more important to me than having 8 speed settings. I’d support sacrificing a working speed to avoid flinging drag knives periodically as people re-discover this quirk.
At least something worth teaching in class- not sure why to bother learning how to set anything other than general “speed via vibe” settings knowing there’s only 8 possible pre-programmed ones.
I was going to make a separate post about this; I think some important information about the CNCs is being forgotten and not taught. There’s no listing anywhere of the available speeds that you can program from Vcarve.
Question for @jamesfreeman : was the limited number of acknowledged speeds a function of the controller or the machine? If the former, does the new controller on the big CNC still have that limitation? (Nick, which machine were you using?)
Big one
I just joined this forum and ran across this post. I have had my Laguna IQ for 8 years now. I also have used Vectric vCarve and Aspire over those 8 years. A key thing that bothered me after I got my machine was there was no way for me to set the spindle speed for my Laguna machine from Vectric - even though there is a spindle speed setting in vectric software. The speed setting in the Vectric setting is ignored by the Laguna controller, the spindle speed is always set by the Variable Frequency Drive (VFD) controller - it ignores the input from Vectric. The manual for the controller indicates the Spindle should not be set to less than 6,000 rpm (at least that is what I recall), but I know I have ran it less than that rpm using the VFD. When I need to have the spindle run at 0 rpm, I turn the spindle off on the pendant controller after starting the tool path. I did not know about modifying the gcode that was produced by Vectric - may want to try that for myself.