New to Forum from NC

[Tilted Knight]

Hello! We look forward to hopefully giving and receiving tips with many of you. We are new to the CNC Plasma world. We are still in the learning curve as to working from design through to cutting. We have had some early successes but also some confusing “fails”.
We are running a Hypertherm 85 , a Premier Plasma 5x10 table with a Promo THC, using Inkscape, SheetCam and Mach 3.
Recently we “designed” a few pieces, sent them to SheetCam, then to Mach 3 and all of a sudden it was as if the table had a mind of its own, cutting things way out of alignment, and even not cutting all the way through the sheet (11 gage).
On another attempt with a different design, we could not get it to show up at all in SheetCam.
Wondering if any of you have any suggestions or experience with these types of strange situations.
Thank you in advance!

Dave C

[acourtjester]

Welcome aboard When doing a drawing it needs to be saved as a path, in inkscape if you click on the node tool and then on the drawing you should see all the node the make up the drawing. On the other could you have changed the post processor in SheetCam. Tables follow the G-code they are given, a post processor is setup for the table and if you change the post processor then the G-code will not work the same.
Also when loading drawing into SheetCam if the dimension are not the same it will cause a problem. By this is mean if you draw in inches and tell SheetCam it is metric it will be different, also you can change the scale in SheetCam when loading the drawing.

[robertspark]

Welcome,

don't cross post as it makes it difficult to help when the subject is going on in two places at once.

viewtopic.php?f=52&t=30674&sid=a3a3edcf ... c498200ba1

[robertspark]

can you take a screenshot of your mach3 screenset please and or post your mach 3 profile to take a look at

it will be in the C:/mach3/ folder

it will have the extension *.XML.

you won't be able to add it as an attachment, but you can resave it or create a copy of it as a text file (or any other extension (dxf etc) and we can rename and open it to take a look, of copy and paste the contents into a code block "</>"

If its going off on its own.... I suspect it will be a mach3 licence issue.... but it is worth while taking a look anyway and letting you know if anything is apparent.

[Tilted Knight]

Sorry about the cross-post, but thank you for letting me know (new to forums as well). We will check in to your suggestions when we get back in the shop and let you know what we find.

[_jay_]

Dont forget to specify the file type etension when opening it in sheetcam, otherwise it makes shit.

[Tilted Knight]

Thank you for all of the suggestions and help. We found that we were having a grounding issue. We had the control panel mounted to the table which was interfering with the ground for the table itself. We've unmounted the control panel and retried the files we were having issues with and we were able to get them cut perfectly!

As far as our problem with a svg file not showing up in sheetcam goes, we still have not found a solution. Everything is a path so we know that is not the cause. When we open the file in Sheetcam it says that no layer is found so nothing shows up at all. I have attached the file that we are trying to open so that maybe you are able to see what we are missing.

Thank you again for your help!

[acourtjester]

Interesting I downloaded your file and opened it in Inkscape no problem saved is as a DXF. Opened the DXF in SheetCam fine the tried your file nothing showed in SheetCam no error either. What program did you develop the SVG with. Some software programs do not play nice together

TK sword.dxf

(10.06 KiB) Downloaded 43 times

TK sword.JPG (18.38 KiB) Viewed 513 times

[Tilted Knight]

We created the file in Inkscape which we use for most of what we do, both SVG and DXF, and have never had this problem before. I even re drew the same design over again and it did the same thing.

[acourtjester]

Ok I found out what the problem is, I don't know how you did it but when you drew it and gave it a path you did not have a stroke width see attached. When I loaded your SVG it shows fine but when I looked at the stroke it showed 0.000, just clicking on the stroke tab then assigned a value to your drawing and after saving and loading into SheetCam it was there.

TK sword 5.JPG (36.6 KiB) Viewed 502 times

[Tilted Knight]

Wow, Sure enough that was it! Not sure how I managed to do that either. Thanks for figuring that out!