Need Advice

[Bud Love]

Hey Guys,
Making pocket knife scales, (handles).
Having trouble with the engraving.
approx .94 tall, 3.5 long, .10 thick.

I have tried 90 60 1/8 1/16 nothing looks good.

What font, what depth, what bit, would you use?

[scottp55]

Bud, Can you post pics of what you didn't like about the cuts. Seems like any of the bold or semi bold truetype fonts at about .3" font height would VCarve with a 60 vbit or a 90 if 60 degree was cutting to deep and you didn't want to use flat depth. I only say .3 " font height centered in the blank as I imagine you're fairing it down to the tang. Just preview and stay away from fonts that have very thin "tracery" as they can disappear after sanding. Might recommend a very light surfacing and finish sanding it before carving so font will cut uniformly.

[Brian Harnett]

On small font I use a 22 degree v bit it gets deep enough to show the finer parts of the font.

[srwtlc]

Bud, is the surface that you're carving on dead flat or is it shaped some. If it's shaped, and you're using Aspire, you can choose to 'Project toolpath onto 3D model'.

Zoom in close on your text to see if it has jagged outlines or overlaps, some text can be 'dirty'.

A good dead on pointed v-bit like the ones from Centurion (https://www.centuriontools.com/router-bits-toolcase/solid-carbide-wood-router-bits.html?pcn=V-Carve%20Bits) work well for v-carving small text.

You can over cut by nudging the z a few thousandths (MN) to allow for sanding. Sometimes when setting 'Bold' doesn't give the results I like, I'll add a small offset to the outside with the offset tool (be sure to use select new offset and then group that offset before unselecting or you'll have a lot of reselecting to do).

One last thing I do when running small v-carving is to run with some sort of mushy ramp settings to soften up the abrupt direction changes that can cause some 'jiggle' at the point of these direction changes.

[Bud Love]

No pics.
Thanks for the tips.
The 22 v bit sounds good.