Putting letters together to make words

Hello, I am new to cnc plasma cutting, I am looking for a way to combine letters to make words. I am not sure if this can be done or not, I have looked through the different fonts trying to find something the plasma will cut out as a single word. any help would be appreciated.

Biker

You need to join the words in a design program. You can use something like Inkscape (free) or even Fusion 360. Inkscape can use Boolean operations to join them or node manipulation as Fusion does.

If you have the letters you want to join (& the font you want to use), post them and I can put together a quick pictorial on how to do it.

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I did the letters in Inkscape and went through everything and now get an error from fusion 360 saying one or more passes were discarded due to linking constraints

That’s usually because your lead-in/lead-out settings are too large for your pieces. Check to see if you have the inside/outside of the line selections are correct. Take a look at your cuts - you may need to zoom in - and you should see which parts couldn’t fit your settings and still make the cuts.

Then adjust your lead-in/out distance, angle and radius to get them to fit - if that doesn’t work then try eliminating the lead-out. You can also adjust your kerf - something between .03-06 tends to be correct depending on your cutter, tip size & amperage.

I am trying to learn everything, must be getting old and things aren’t coming easy anymore. I am trying to do a word art with “HOT” vertical and “DOG” horizontal sharing the same letter O. When I ply the simulator in fusion 360 it works, but when I put in Mach3 it only does part of the letters and stops in the middle of the G code. The tool window also only shows part of it. I am using a font that my plasma won’t cut?

Are you using the demo version of mach 3? If so the demo version is only good for 500 lines of codes.

yes I am. I am getting red dashed lines around some of the letters where they are curved.

That’s because it’s the demo version of Mach 3. It will cut you off at 500 lines which isn’t huge. You can either break it up into separate G-Code files or get the full license and you’ll be able to get all of your letters.

Is that the reason for the dashed lines outside the curve area of my letters? It’s almost like it is trying to double cut

It looks like line segments that made the letters, I did the letters in Inkscape and saved as a dxf file