Sheetcam does not appear to have an issue with my setting or the cut after some adjustments (fine cut slow speed (150ipm, .029kerf according to Hypertherm manual), but when I cutout my moon/alien image, which is the size of a piece of paper roughly, it could not cut in a way that would leave the fine inside pieces for structure. I am using 16g metal, which I figure might be to thin or my image might be to small for this metal, but trying to figure out what the next step would be to properly cut out this i
Attached will be a photo of the stock image and how it ended up cutting on the machine. Any advice would be appreciated.
Off the top of my head, have you been able to confirm your kerf? It looks like in a couple of spots, the plasma is inadvertently bridging areas that should remain. Adjusting your kerf larger should make Sheetcam change the path providing you more material.
I did not confirm my Kerf I just went based on the setting of the Hypertherm manual with the proper consumables, but I will do so tonight. So if I understand you correctly, If I widen the Kerf setting in sheetcam, you are thinking sheetcam will adjust its center point to give the material more width?
It should. If your kerf is set at say .030", Sheetcam will offset your profile by .015". If the actual kerf in that situation is .045", you will be cutting .0075" into your profile.
Another thing to consider is cut speed. You may want to play around with decreasing / increasing your speed to see what your best results are. Keep in mind, the Hypertherm cut charts are a good beginning. Everyone’s settings vary a bit.
How thick, in design, are the parts that cut through? Those look like pretty thin lines. You may need to modify the design a bit and thicken some of those components that are dropping out. I think on 16ga I would want a minimum of 1/8 inch of material left over… you might get away with a little less. Changing your kerf width to a value larger than it actually is, will leave you with a little more material as was mentioned above.
Eric and Terrance are right on. I have done both things with normal consumables (have not used the fine-cut yet).
What really helped me was turning the amperage down. For the normal consumables with my Hypertherm 45XP, I set it to: For 16g steel 30A, I set my kerf at .025” and at 150ipm. This gave me a lot more spared material as compared to 45A @ 249ipm. You will need to extrapolate with fine cut to see if this would help. This allowed some bridges as small as 0.09 inches to survive but certainly, 0.1 inches was surviving the cut.
As Eric mentioned, when you get below 0.125 inches, it becomes very dependent on how much material may be incidentally removed on both sides. Adjusting the kerf setting larger, moves the torch ever so slightly away from the actual line.
