Re-cutting after a fail

[ben1272]

Been using my XR and finally getting a little more familiar with it. I have found it pretty easy to use and so far, pretty reliable. Most often, my mistakes come in the form of starting a cut from a spot that causes me to run of an edge, or through an existing hole in the stock. This leads to a flame out and forced rest. Sometimes, the machine will trace back over already-cut geometry and make it all the way to the failure point, but sometimes it wont. To help it make it, I have tried applying aluminum duct tape over the pre-cut geometry to help maintain an electrically continuous circuit which seems to have worked in at least a couple of attempts. I short it to the stock with the ground clamp.

Other times, I have pushed a scrap sheet up along side my stock where the toolpath is going off the edge and this allow the cut to continue, albeit with slightly misshapen outline as a result…sometimes better than abandoning the whole cut!

In any case, I would like to know what I ma missing with reagrds to recovering from these sorts of mis-steps, as these are the most common type of problem I am encountering as a new user. As I get more expereienced they will hopefully become much less common, but if there are techniques for limping by these mistakes, I’d like to know what they are!

Come one come all, how do you all handle these types of incidents?

Thanks!

-Ben

[TinWhisperer]

In fire control you can select a different starting point in the geometry then just the beginning, even part way through a line.

When you select an area you can either choose start from loop which will be that entire Pierce and cut or you can start from line which will start part way through a loop.
In your case it sounds like you want to start from line down in the g code section after you select the area in the visualizer you want to start from.

Selecting from line will create a new Pierce and start point to the program.

FireControl Continue mid Code

Here is an example with screen shots. [line%20loop%201%20] [line%20loop%202%20] in this example it stops cutting for some reason. you repair the problem and need to pickup where it stopped cutting. here that is the top right of the W. We select that area and are given 2 options below as it jumps to that line of code. (Line 1494 in this case) [line%20loop%203%20] SELECTING LOOP will load a new program from the last pierce. [line%20loop%204%20] [line%20loop%205%20%20] SELECTING LINE wi…

[ben1272]

Thanks Tin. I will read up on this more.

I assume you have to start at the beginning of the closest entity to where the flame out happened? In this case I know firecontrol will calculate a new toolpath that starts at the beginning of the last entity that was cutting. I would like to be closer to where the cut failed though. I will read the link you provided! Thanks.

update: I read the post you linked to, thanks for sending and for documenting the process. If I read correct, this gets you close to the point of flame out, but only as close as the start of the closest line entity (line, arc, etc).

Hopefully Langmuir is working towards sensing when flame out happens, noting coordinates and incorporating ability to pick up closer to the flame out point. Might be cool if it could attempt recovery on its own even.