Project 1 from EmptyNester. Category: Custom Shop Tools - CNC Table

[Rambozo]

To make things easier to debug, maybe you would be better suited to just cut a simple square with no change in the corners at all. Or maybe a circle.

You could just manually program a square without any offset or any fancy stuff at all, just make the torch pierce then move in a square then stop.

Personally I would make it real simple and program a straight line with a an increasing feedrate to learn what speed makes the best cut for my combination of torch, amps, and material.

Something simple like starting from X0 Y0:

G1 X1.0 F20
G1 X2.0 F30
G1 X3.0 F40
G1 X4.0 F50
G1 X6.0 F60

Run that across a 6" piece of your sample material and see what it looks like. If it completes the cut, crank up the speeds and run it again. Then you will see what speed you need to make the cleanest cut and where it breaks down both above and below. That will give you your speed envelope. You can do finer increments if you need to break it down further, once you have the ballpark numbers. The correct feedrate will allow your cam package to do the correct compensations for curves and such. You can also program a series of pierce delays to figure out how long to make that, just a series of holes spaced apart. Make each one shorter until it fails to pierce. I'm sure you want a little buffer there, but again it would give you some ballpark figures for your combination.

[sportbike]

Personally I would make it real simple and program a straight line with a an increasing feedrate to learn what speed makes the best cut for my combination of torch, amps, and material.

Something simple like starting from X0 Y0:

G1 X1.0 F20
G1 X2.0 F30
G1 X3.0 F40
G1 X4.0 F50
G1 X6.0 F60

Run that across a 6" piece of your sample material and see what it looks like. If it completes the cut, crank up the speeds and run it again. Then you will see what speed you need to make the cleanest cut and where it breaks down both above and below. That will give you your speed envelope. You can do finer increments if you need to break it down further, once you have the ballpark numbers. The correct feedrate will allow your cam package to do the correct compensations for curves and such. You can also program a series of pierce delays to figure out how long to make that, just a series of holes spaced apart. Make each one shorter until it fails to pierce. I'm sure you want a little buffer there, but again it would give you some ballpark figures for your combination.

That's a damn good idea Ram. Once a rough idea of speed is figured out, straight lines with variable THC voltage settings could be done to dial height in as well.

Probably could get a pretty good idea on speeds and feeds from using two or three material thicknesses and spending about to minutes on each one, then interpolating the results for other thicknesses.