Hi There, I apologise if this is a simple question but I have not been able to find the answer to my problem within the forum.
My setup is… design within Illustrator, export dxf to sheet cam and post process to Mach3 for cutting on a CNCMogul machine with a Donek D4 cutting blade
My objective is to cut out a single shape with a continuous cutting path out of a sheet of abs plastic 2.5mm thick.
So far so simple!
My problem is not so easy to explain. You can see from my screen shot attached that my shape is long and thin. This means that the mogul drags the knife for 50% of the time and pushes the knife for the other 50%. My problem is when the blade is pushed, its not happy with the stresses. (As a side note I am cutting in multiple 0.5mm passes to reduce the stress on the mogul as its not very solid and can flex) So back to the pushing of the blade, as its making multiple passes it wanders when it pushes and I don’t get an accurate cut. My solution in an ideal world would be to create more than one start point in the cut path and set the path to drag the knife for each start. So my question is can I break up the cutting path with multiple start points? Or can anyone think of another solution? Apologies for the long winded explanation . Lisa
Hi Lisa,
I replied to your email but I’ll expand on my reply here. With your drawing as it is, SheetCam will handle it as one complete outline. You need to break the outline up into segments. Sheetcam will cut each segment with it’s own start point. For instance if you overlap the lines at the point of your shape and at the bottom arc you will end up with separate lines that can be cut separately.
Note that by default SheetCam joins small gaps or overlaps but you can disable that by going to options->application options->drawing import. Set the import link tolerance to 0.
Many thanks for the help below but I had no success,
When I follow this method I get the error message attached,
So I created layers in my editor which is illustrator and imported the file with the layers, I then set the operation parameters for each layer, my second attachment is the image of this toolpath. its fine except for the huge green arcs that sheetcam is generating, can anyone tell me how to get rid of them? Many thanks.Lisa
The error message appears if you are trying to cut a layer that doesn’t exist. The solution is to open the knife cutting operation and select a suitable layer.
That big arc looks like a bug in SheetCam. Could you send me the job file so I can try to work out what on earth is going on there.