[bigcolornj]

Hey...I bought a new router for my business, a Colex flatbed sharp cutter. For my everyday business it is perfect. For those of you who do not know, it has a 5' x 10' bed, has routing and 2 additional tools available per project. Scoring, knife cutting, etc. We cut lots of plastics, foam boards, corrugated, aluminum and acrylics, etc. and it does a great job. I do not see many posts using this machine in this forum or any other forum. However the machine is capable of so much more. I even put my logo in wood, loving it! So I am making a post because I have had the machine for about 2 months and I sorted out my day to day operations with the machine and want to expand outside the box.

I have been experimenting with "etching" in wood. Where do I learn more about this? What depths, what bits, what woods? So far, bought some nice red oak planks. I used a 1.5 mm router bit and made logo look gorgeous. But I want to do finer stuff. I bought an .8 mm bit that busted up immediately. Where do I learn how to do fine precision stuff?

Next, I want to "etch" in metal. Where do I start, what recommendations do you have? What bits, how deep?

What is my next project! I have all this equipment at my finger tips!

Thanks for listening and thanks more for responding!

My picture is not very impressive sorry... the machine was bought to do other stuff. I was just messing around. I want to do finer graphics... can I? That board is 8" x 10"

Mike

 

[Semipro]

Hello and Welcome to the router forum.
The logo looks very clean
The CNC guys will have help with rest of the questions

 

[old55]

Welcome to the forum Mike.

 

[RainMan 2.0]

Welcome to the forum . If you could update your profile with a first name , that would be great .
That certainly looks like a very capable machine . I’m sure the experts will chime in soon

 

[Cherryville Chuck]

Big Color, Wycoff, New Jersey? Looks like that might be you. Welcome. I'm also not a CNCer but if you broke the .8 bit then I would say you were either going too fast, too deep, or both. A bit that small would basically only allow you to scratch the surface with each pass. By the way, when you are asking questions like that in CNC routing, bit size, bit depth, and feed speed are critical information the experts here will need to be able to answer you.