I have a few questions about finishing a piece that was cut. I make monograms with my router, and after I'm done I have to spend a ton of time cleaning up all of the edges. I use a downcut spiral bit, so the top edge is already a lot cleaner than the bottom edge, so I know that a compression bit would probably work better, but I don't want to have to shell out that kind of money. I also saw a trick of using a downcut to begin with then an upcut for the final pass that cuts all the way through, so I may try that. But there is still going to be finishing that needs to be done. Basically I wanted to know if it's normal to have to sand down all of the edges or if I'm doing something wrong. I'm using an OX with a dewalt router. When I get home I'll post some pictures of the edges that I'm talking about. I was also wondering how many cuts people can do before having to get a new bit. I seem to be able to cut maybe 5-10 plywood monograms with one bit. I'm doing about 70ipm and roughly 16k rpm at 1/16th inch passes in 1/2" birch ply. I'm needing to do some more testing to see if I can go a bit deeper per pass with the same feed rate, but in the past I've noticed that it bogs down and tends to run off of the path and ruin the piece. I just feel like my machine is not as capable as other peoples, so maybe there is something wrong with the way I set it up. Thanks for any information!
