sheetcam.com

I have a DXF of a sheet metal part that I exported from Solid Edge 2020. I imported into SheetCam and there are four very wide gaps on the perimeter. However, if I import the same DXF into other programs, Inkscape, Sketchup, CamBam, there are no gaps and the path is complete. I've attached the DXF and I hope someone can explain why SheetCam isn't joining these paths.

I'm using SheetCam TNG 6.0.30

I've since loaded the file also into FreeCad and QCad, both of them 'see' the complete perimeter without a problem. I also imported into CamBam, selected all the segments in the outer perimeter, did a join, which created a single polyline, exported to a new DXF and this was accepted as a closed contour in SheetCam.

I did try to adjust the Import Link Tolerance, going as far as 0.01 inch, and SheetCam still had a gap in the four spots.

I did notice that two of the splines connect without a gap, but those two are cases where the spline starts at an Arc and ends at a straight line. The cases where there is a gap, the spline ends at an Arc (for whatever that observation is worth).

One other odd thing I noticed is that of the four gaps, two are one length and the other two are another length and both lengths appear to be proportional to the length of the segment seeming like some gross scaling error on splines...

It took me a while to find the problem. The lines are stored in the dxf file as splines with some rather odd values. They are technically correct but they trip up SheetCam's spline code. In Solid Edge do you have an option to set the dxf version? If so, set it to the earliest you can find. V12 is good if they have it.

Les Newell wrote: ↑Tue May 19, 2020 5:31 pm In Solid Edge do you have an option to set the dxf version? If so, set it to the earliest you can find. V12 is good if they have it.

Thanks for looking at this! I'll check out the version control and let you know...

Les, yes, Solid Edge offered the option to set DXF version (12,13,14) on output. I set it to V12 and, voila! SheetCam is happy once again! Thanks, hopefully there aren't any downsides to this. This plate is pretty simple, so I don't expect an issue here... I'm just wondering if I have a pattern with bezier curves, etc... I'm not expecting anything any time soon, but ya never know.

Thanks again!
Tom

There shouldn't be any issues. SheetCam normally handles beziers and splines correctly. It's just this case where Solid Edge represented a straight line as a spline with slightly odd values.

Thanks for the additional info, I appreciate it!