Can the plasma cut text like a line?

CrossFire ® Tips and Tricks
1

I was wonding if, with fine text, instead of fusion 360 treating the text as a letter to cut out, if we could somehow get it to draw the text as a line. Am I making sense? With a single Pass of the cnc machine?

2

Yes. Create the text, select it and right click. On the drop-down menu you’ll find “Explode Text”. Click that. It converts the text to paths (lines).

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3

Thanks @jamesdhatch, I know now how to do that portion, but say the text is too small, and I just want the text to be a single line that gets cut, not an actual shape cut out of the letter, but a line like a single line drawn with a pen.

4

I’m interested in this as well

5

You need to find a single line font or single stroke font. Usually you have to pay for these fonts.

I have used a regular font like arial or times new roman, exploded the font, then delete one side of each character or letter. The issues I had is the pierce locations and stop locations are always wider then the actual cut line and you can’t extrude the part in f360 or all the lines disappear, so all cuts need to be manually selected. And don’t go too small on the font like I did.

This was a test cut for a fillet template plate.

20181222_000000
20181222_0000002540Ă—1193 1.5 MB

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6

Correct. But if you Google “Hershey Font” or “Engravers Font” or “single stroke font” you should be able to find some that are free downloads.

Check out dafont.com as well. Even some of their standard fonts could work for what you’re looking for (script ones especially).

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7

Forgot about Hershey font. I think Hersey font is embedded in, I want to say inkscape, as an option for text.

8

Yep, it is.

Inkscape. Extensions. Render. Hershey Text.

(Edit)

Type you text. Apply. Close the dialog box. File. Save as. Name the file. Save as type is inkscape svg. Open in f360.

You do have to modify the text a bit to make it work well though. But that’s easy enough.

Thanks @jamesdhatch for jogging my memory. Next time I need to do this I will go this route.

9

Try saving as a regular (not Inkscape) SVG - it may insert cleaner into F360. Inkscape’s version can cause issues with some other applications looking for standard SVG for compatibility.

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10

Thanks guys! I would have been searching for hours without your knowledge. I appreciate it.