I was wondering if anyone had a trick for cutting out signs with sequential numbering. I need to make 100’s of 3” x 16” x 3/16” steel ID tags with the company’s name and a sequential number following. There has to be a better way than making a template in cad to edit and save each individually. At first I was going to do it all in SheetCam, array the template, and number each after; but couldn’t find a good stencil font.
I typically use Bendtech/ SheetCam/ ComandCNC but also have fusion and the freecad program.
The last small job I did like this was quite time consuming. I feel like I am missing something really simple here and any help would be greatly appreciated!
EDIT: I TOTALLY misspoke assigning this capability to Lightburn. The feature is in VCarve Pro and is called “Plate Production” which will layout a design based on rules you assign and data you provide from a file. Typically a spreadsheet. My apologies for the mistake
The resulting patterns can be easily saved as svg.
I used it to create place setting cards for my daughter’s wedding. I made the patterns in Lightburn, from a list of names, but then engraved using VCarve and my CNC router. There were over 200 cards, each unique.
@TomWS said Lightburn. Yeppers, Lightburn works, and/or Inkscape.
I am not so sure about Inkscape and reiterating values on the canvas. For instance, in Inkscape, one can save as a .svg formatted image and/or alter things.
So, just import your ID Tags by the 100’s and then rearrange them in a fashion. Export as .svg or another format and then relay them to the SheetCAM source. I think either can work.
Seth
P.S. I have researched Lightburn in the past. I am not an official owner of the source but I installed it about six months back and used it a couple of times. Lightburn has a bunch of options. A bunch.
Thank you for the replies! I looked into Lightburn, and will look into VCarve as well tonight. What I do have is Inkscape, but am not really great with it. So, I may try finding a tutorial on that as well. Appreciate ya both.
So I’ve been playing with the VcarvePro trial and got it to do exactly what I was looking to do, thank you for the recommendation!!! This will save me so much time and pay for itself in the first job. Definitely not cheap though, and the trial version won’t let me export vector drawings.
TomWS, do you use this for plasma cnc instead of sheetcam?
I don’t have a router setup yet but might add one to my arclight table in the near future, this may be a good investment and bit of software to learn.
No, I use Sheetcam as it has all the functions needed to run a Plasma Cutter. VCarve would require too much fudging around to even get close to what Sheetcam can do.
I use Vcarve mostly for wood or 3D look Acrylic pieces (using a spring loaded diamond stylus). Sometimes, however, some of its features, like the Plate Production function, comes in handy for other tools, but its mostly the design part, not the CAM part that is useful in these cases.
Thank you for the advice. I wound up getting Vcarve Pro and it made such light work of this job. I did put it into sheetcam for the same reason, but have some learning to do as far as exporting individual parts or layers in vcarve and setting bulk tool paths in sheetcam. What I wound up doing is exporting the whole job as one flat dxf file, importing into sheetcam, selecting the outside contours of the whole sheet to make its own layer, set the tool paths, then breaking apart the job into manually nested drawings under the parts window. Probably a better way but it worked.
