At this point I am in the learning stages of CNC Plasma cutting. I don’t have my machine yet so I have been learning Inkscape and Fusion 360 CAM. I’ve been using Fusion 360 for a couple years for the machine shop and 3D printing.
So here are a couple of questions. I drew up a sign tonight in Inkscape, saved it as .dxf file and opened it in Fusion. It appears either I didn’t do it right or… but it couldn’t be extruded. How do you set the thickness of the material you are going to use?
Second question, I opened it in Fusion 360 CAM and most of it looks like I could do the cutting paths but there are a couple section that don’t look complete for some reason.
Here is the file… Now this my first real drawing in Inkscape other then boxes, circles and stars.
You had a few areas like this, where a white dot appeared. Those were, sometimes, segments that did not meet.
When you zoom up on it, you can see the problem:
Some elements like this, Fusion will disregard the full detail because the area is smaller than the kerf width of the torch. It will do the largeer part of the spear head but not the base. You could either widen the area or turn it into a open contour with a straight line cut:
I went thru and corrected those spots. There were about 10 of them. The Youngs Chelan.f3d (245.6 KB)
This should extrude okay now.
You can extrude the body to the thickness of the material but it really does not matter how thick you extrude. The only thing “Manufacturing” is going to use is the “face of the body.” It is your “tool” for the material type and thickness that determines the speed of the cut. The speed in the tool necessarily slows down for thick material and speeds up for thin material.
For some reason, I didn’t think I could modify the skatch. I must have been doing something wrong the, I was able to modify it today. Once I changed the save option in Inkscape it transfered to Fusion 360 without a problem.
So on the thickness of the material, I would set that up in the tool setup for each thickness of material?
I will go through the videos again and check it out.
I need to look up a speed and feed sheet, (for the lack of proper terminology).
Yep, know where you are at. I often forget the name of things and I have been doing this for 3 years. It is usually referred to as “Cut Charts.” Everyone’s setup varies so unless you have Hypertherm, you need to experiment with some test cuts. At the very least do about 10 straight cuts with 10 ipm difference (+/-) based on some “norm” for your machine. If there is no literature with your machine search for “Cut charts” on this forum or the internet.
Two conditions will stop you from editing: constraints or the sketch was not in “edit” mode.
Here is something to remember about “tools” in Fusion. This is probably the most important tab. Under the “cutter tab” just make the kerf and torch the same (somewhere in the 0.05 range +/- 0.015 inches). The "cutting data is the real meats and potatoes but notice all of the numbers circled in red will not likely pass thru to the post processing page. The post processing page in another lesson. Just get a couple of tools in then you can move on to the next lesson:
Bakergas is where I purchased my Hypertherm. No problems with it.
Yep. Can’t seem to find one that I stay interested that isn’t. I am not one for “beach combing.” Of course now that I think of it, that could get expensive if you are flying to different beaches.
