Another sheetcam question....I think

Hi all, I am trying to make some 22lr targets and I was able to get the ram finished today.

But my question is about “lead in” and “lead outs”.

In the below screen shots you can see that the “hole area” for the horns looks good, however it seems to indicate that when it goes to cut out the “body” it starts at the base of the neck and appears to have a small “lead in” coming from the inside of the ram.

I would prefer the “lead in” come from the outside when it cuts out the body

Is there a way to change that?


you need to change your inside offset…to outside offset…that is one way
you might also have to layer your cuts depending on how it was drawn…
layering in sheecam is easy…just google Sheetcam layers

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You have “inside offset” selected in your operation. There are very few reasons to ever use that setting in Sheetcam, if you are doing the whole drawing in one operation.

If your drawing doesn’t have errors, selecting “outside offset” will allow Sheetcam to automatically assign the correct offsets for inside, outside and no offset cuts. Using “inside offset” will reverse all of the offsets and give the opposite of what you normally want.

It looks like there is an error in your drawing and I’d bet that yellow triangle in the upper left will tell you that. It looks like the outside outline is not connected, so Sheetcam sees that as an open contour and has assigned “no offset”. The break is probably at the start point (S1). It’s just a happy accident that the closed loop on the horns was assigned an inside offset, because the outside is not a closed loop.

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He set it up that way the other day to get a pig without the lead ins on the inside. He wanted the positive shape…

@RunsWithScissors what material are you cutting targets out of? Any ricochets or significant denting?

You’re right. I bet that yellow warning says open paths were not offset

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You guys are pretty good. The offset was throwing an error.

So do I have to fix it in the Fusion drawing, then redo in Sheetcam to remove the error?

@Phillipw I have 2 small sheets of “3/16” and 1/4" mystery metal" that my SIL found, but I haven’t actually cut anything out yet.

Too many projects going on and work keeps getting in the way. :wink:

I will post my results when I get a chance to cut them out and take a few shots at them.

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You would fix that in fusion so the outer shape is complete. Then change your tool path I outside offset in sheet cam. It will cut the outside contour on the outside, then recognize the inside one needs an inside offset and will generate from he inside.

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OK, so I think I found the problem.

in the screen shot it appears that the last dot is not 'darkend" , but I can not figure out how to get it ‘darkend’.

I keep trying to drag and drop it on the 1st dot to complete the drawing but it will not “drop on” to complete the drawing.

any suggestions?

I think I fixed it.

What say you?

Although, admittedly I have no idea “how” I did it (if it is in fact fixed)

I think that is one of the frustrating things about Fusion. I keep clicking around and then when I do something right, I have no idea how to duplicate it because of the 10,000 other things I tried are still whirling around in my head.

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Looks good. I don’t use Fusion, but in Freecad you would have to select both points and apply a “coincident” constraint.

@ds690 I tried that but could not get it to work.

But like I said, I end up clicking and dragging all kinds of things and it all starts to 'meld together".

I still have no idea how I get the tool bar to switch to the view where I use the tools like ‘line’ and “circle” etc. when I start a new drawing.

I literally just keep clicking and left clicking stuff until it pops up, then I say a quick prayer and consider myself fortunate that it is working.

Then I stumble around for hours and get something close to what I want.

Then I click, and left click around for a while until I accidently find the “save as DXF” menu that magically appears, say another quick prayer, and consider myself lucky as I hit “save”

Edit: Oh and I use the 'undo" button so much, I am afraid I will wear it out.

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Sometimes you need to click and wait a beat or two before you try to move it. Particularly if there was another point already picked.
(I got that tip on a video where the guy was using Fit-point-splines, like you were in that example.)

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I thought that I noticed some sort of “lag time” on occasion. I will keep this in mind.

If I can find it, I already created in F360 and cut out a set of all of those targets. Give me a little time to find the file(s) and I’ll send them to you.

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@RunsWithScissors

Here are the files for those NRA Silhouette targets. The .NC file was from when I cut a set roughly a year ago. I believe the steel was 3/8", but not 100% sure. It was provided by guy who requested targets.

I’m not near my Firecontrol PC so I did not confirm settings.

BTW, I do everything in metric, so you dxf will default to that when opened. Also, these are scaled correctly for NRA stds. Ignore extraneous points in dxf. They’ll disappear when extruded. Just a result of file type conversion.

NRA Silouhette Targets.dxf (49.7 KB)
NRA Silhouette.nc (28.1 KB)

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@Wsidr1 Thank you very much sir.

I hope to be able to get some cut out after I finally get my furnace and A/C installed.

Damn projects keep stacking up faster than I can keep up, and that damn job is always getting in the way of “project progress”.

I can hardly wait to retire.

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