Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

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tinyswamp
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Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:08 am

Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by tinyswamp »

Totally new to Sheetcam, just learning the flow of things. Quick Question.

So I load in a .dxf from AutoCAD or Inventor or whatever, I select the drawing position as 0,0, and go about setting up my tooling operations.

When adjusting cut paths (this is all plasma, btw, 14GASS), why can I not seem to tell Sheetcam to ignore the two edges of the part that share edges with the sheet? It seems to me to be a waste of time to run the plasma arc over edges that dont need to be cut. From my limited research it seems that the only way I can figure to get this done is to put in custom tool rules written in gcode to turn THC on/off when its going over custom action points. Is that correct?
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djreiswig
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Re: Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by djreiswig »

Most generally you cut the entire part out so it is the correct dimensions in case your material isn't perfectly aligned. If you don't want to cut those areas you will have to move them to another layer or remove them.
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djreiswig
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Re: Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by djreiswig »

If you remove them, you will have created an open path. You'll want to make sure you tick offset open paths so the cutter runs on the correct side of the lines.
tinyswamp
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Re: Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by tinyswamp »

I agree with you about squaring off the edges. Thing is though, we square our sheets up on the 12' shear before it goes to the CNC. 60" 's get ripped and squared to 30"x72", 48" 's to 24"x72" or 24"x60". So those two extra cuts will be inefficient, and our tolerances aren't really that critical honestly.

I'll look into layering the cut, I appreciate the response. At least I have a starting off point for my research instead of wandering around aimlessly. I'm skilled at drafting and fabricating but my new boss just kind of threw me to the wolves with the new plasma cutter.
WyoGreen
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Re: Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by WyoGreen »

When I do my plasma cutting, I just roughly square up the whole sheet on the table, then place my 0,0 point a 1/8" or so in from the corner and have at it, cutting the whole pattern. It seems like the inefficiency in your operation is the cutting the sheets on a shear before placing them on the table, unless your table is not big enough to take the whole sheet.

Just my 2 cents, Steve
tinyswamp
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Re: Noob here - How to ignore edges of material?

Post by tinyswamp »

We rip and square our sheets into roughly similar sizes, and then figure our stretch outs to accommodate those sizes. Say we need a table for a job, we'll design that table, according to its needs of course, but so that the overall stretchout is equal to the sizes we rip down on the shear. The idea with the CNC plasma is to essentially just notch the corners of the sheets and cut them down to length, that way it can go pretty much straight to the press break. The efficiency comes when we can line up a months worth of tables and cut them all in one day on the CNC and just pass them along to the fabricators as need be.
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