King Colorcore cutting

[ed_lang]

I am cutting King Colorcore for the first time. I am using a 3 flute Whiteside bit, 60* @17K RPM and 4IPS. I am getting good edge quality but am getting small pieces of material that is not cut all the way and it is causing fuzz in some of the letters. The air hose will blow away about 60% and by running a sharpened dowel in the letters I can clear it out. I am using V-Carve PRO 3.1 and starting the cut at .04" so I can make sure all of the letters are cut in the white center and not v-carved into the green top layer.

How are you cutting this stuff? Bits, speeds and feeds etc... Quality of cut and how to you clean up the letters if needed?

The signs I am cutting are packed with text and the font is very small.

[gary_n]

I used an 1/8" spiral upcut @1ips and I think 10,000 rpm. and had the same or similar problem on that same material. I am thinking that a downcut spiral just might eliminate the hanging chips.

[ed_lang]

Does anyone route King Colorcore?

I just finished cleaning up six signs that were V carved. Lots of mess but I found a way to clean it up.

I would love to hear what others are doing and how small you can route the letters.

[jhicks]

We have cut quite a bit of color core and its competitive brands. The thing about V carving is a tough one though. There doesn't seem to be a good clean V bit cut method (or we havent found one). So we generally we cut in an area clear fashion using Onsrud corner radiused bits to eliminate mill marks on the flat milled surface in 1/16",1/8" or 1/4" spiral up cuts. Make sure its dead flat and held well, then we run around 10,000 to 12,000rpm at around 60 to 120IPM depending on detail, depth, and bit size.
When we do need to v we clean up fuzzies with a stiff plastic bristle brush fairly effectively but still some debris remains in the well of the V.
I spoke with onsrud tech support and they said they were working on a better design about a year ago but as far as I know it never was offered for sale. Its worth checking with them though, Nice folks and very helpful.
I think with very small fonts that you might like a 1/16" area clear bit since the v never really transitions up and out well at the serif tips and the v is so shallow anyway. All you want to do is be able to get crisp edges, flat bottoms, and see the core color and with an area clear you get that rather then that color transition on the surface which loses the impact of the fine line V cut as the color fades from core to top color.
Thats our take on it anyway.
Good luck.

[ckurak]

Here is a thought on cleaning up the debris left behind in the channels: Run the program twice.

This has worked for me on routing small designs on some wood products. Would it also work on acrylic products? I do cut acrylics, but not often enough to offer an experienced opinion.

Another thought that has helped me, also on wood:

To paraphrase Scott Feimster, of Onsrud, if the scrap looks better than the cut piece, then reverse the direction of the cut.

I have taken Scott's comments and applied them as follows. I make two passes, one in each direction. Then, each "side of the cut" gets both a climb cut as well as a conventional cut. The seems to give me smooth edges as well as clean out most of the debris.

I have effectively used this technique when cutting fluted pilasters. Before I did this, one side of every flute was still rough after a single, one-directional pass. Now both sides are smooth.

[centurion]

Centurion Tools new colorcore bit solved Ed's problem as you can read in some of his other post's