Question for anyone using Sheetcam

[Beefy]

Could anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong.

I've imported 2 separate drawings into Sheetcam and I want to cut them out on one peice of material (plasma cutting). Initially, after importing the first
drawing, I would import the 2nd drawing but the first one would dissapear off the material, so after importing them I saved each one as a part then opened the 2 parts to get them both showing on the material.

However Sheetcam only seems to deal with one at a time, it doesn't cut one then immediately go over to cut the next part. On the left of the screen under "parts", each part is listed with a tick box next to it. Both tick boxes are
ticked but I only get a cut path for one part when I click on the part name. How do I make the 2 parts get cut at once.

Is there somewhere in setup where I have to enable multiple parts. I have the
latest version of Sheetcam and cannot find this. The old V5 PDF manual mentions this but the menus have changed since that version.

Thanks,

Keith.

[tinman13]

Keith, Under Options, application options, advanced tab , check the "Allow multiple parts" box.
Also I believe you want "New part" instead of "import drawing".
As I understand it "Import drawing" adds to or replaces the existing drawing.
If this doesn't work for you post it on the Yahoo - Sheet-cam site, Less is super at support!

Hope this helps, Steve

[Beefy]

Steve,

thanks for the reply. Well at least I found where that tick box was hidden. Forgot about the left / right arrows at the top that give you more tabs to choose from. If I wasn't looking for it, I'd probably see it. Mine was checked so that turned out not to be my problem.

I'll probably ask Les but ask far as I can see my Sheetcam is doing funny things here. When I went to the simulate button there was the cut path, going from table zero to start of cut on the first peice then after doing the first peice, travel over to the 2nd part to do that one then stop at the end of the cut on the second part.

However, out of the simulate screen, I can have either the cut path for only one or the other part but not both. The other funny thing is I get the path starting at machine zero for each part. Until I get this fixed I won't be able to re-arrange start points from part to part.

I'm hoping Les just points out something I'm missing.

Cheers,

Keith.

[Torchhead]

Although SheetCAM treats each "part" as a separate process and lets you define different tools and cut order, etc for each part when you POST process and have but parts enabled in the upper left WINDOW and the process selection boxes checked in the process list for each part then it does two things. It will go out and optimize the toolpath based on all of the parts and it will put them in the same G-code run. If you use the same tool throughout then it's seamless. As you probably have discovered you can select one or more parts in the same part list name and do things like move, rotate, nest, duplicate and do arrays. You can turn one part into hundreds buy first duplicating, nesting and then use the box select to select a whole row and duplicate that. You can't select multiple parts brought in separately as a group to duplicate. You can select and move different parts and nest them.

So each import is treated separately as far as the moving and toolpathing but can be cut together.

i don't use the simulation so I can't address that. I just POST and open the g-code in MACH and is the toolpath screen to view it.

It is only during the POST process that SheetCAM does all of the magic of optimizing the entire job so you need a G-code based simulator to see what you will actually cut.

TOM caudle
www.CandCNC.com