I’m frustrated.
Let me rant for a second before I get to the actual meat of my problem. I also will preemptively say that it’s probably something stupid that I’m doing but my frustration is probably at least well applied somewhere.
I have an OG 2x2 Crossfire with the XL kit and water table. A few months ago I upgraded to the Hypertherm 45XP with machine torch (which was totally worth it). I have done pretty much everything in Fusion360 since the beginning of having this machine and it’s been pretty good and probably severe overkill for cutting 2d shapes out on a plasma. When they moved to the very very expensive mode and won’t let me use the hobby/small business license anymore I sucked it up and paid for the damn monthly subscription. I would probably move to something like Sheetcam except for the fact I also have a cnc router that I’ve recently added to the shop and I need to be able to machine parts out of aluminum so I need that 3d functionality (and of course Fusion sucks at creating v-carve post processing so I had to buy yet another expensive piece of software to do that with - Vectric Vcarve Pro is great but expensive and good for exactly the one thing it does). Just every time I turn around I’m spending more and more money to chase a better finished product.
Anyways - the problem at hand.
Been going back and forth with a customer for about a month about some yard signs she wants for her neighborhood. She’s an artist so I wanted to make sure I was doing as good of a job as is possible to make her happy with how her art turns into the physical world.
Yesterday was the big day. We finally figured out the final art, she’s happy, I’m happy, Fusion is not happy.
I create my setup, so all my normal things and it takes 10 minutes to generate a toolpath on a BEAST of a iMac (I can seriously render a 10 minute 4k movie in Premiere Pro faster than this thing was generating a tool path). Some of the art does have an obnoxious amount of detail that gets melted away with the torch so I figure that’s probably what is going on. Some of the letters are relatively small so it won’t let me put a lead in/out. I end up having to remove them and the pierce clearance entirely but of course then the letters look more like they are from an ad to a horror movie than the nice crisp lines they should have. Everything looks basically like crap all over. The D (I’ll post a picture) looks notchy.
Oh - and for some reason I couldn’t get any feed rates in my g-code during post processing. It defaulted to 6 in/minute when it went to the machine! I stepped that up to 240 in/min with regular nozzles and 45 amps straight out of the Hypertherm book for cutting 18 gauge. I was using a .3s pierce delay also per the book (which is kind of funny - if you choose ‘post process’ from the ribbon menu it will let you only do whole numbers but if you right click on your setup it will let you do partials).
I’m going to keep playing around with it but I really need to figure out this lead in/out/pierce distance problem.