Problem- Engraving Problem's

[weirdharold]

Being thing's are a little slow now, I thought I would try a little engraving with the text engraving-planer option in NX5. But when I try to select my geometry ( curves & splines ), I can't get it to select my geo. Only option's I see are , note's , label , & symbol . Is this option as it say's, "text" only or what am I doing wrong? The file is a logo I brought in with Adobe Illistrator & made it a "dxf " file . Thank's for any help in advance.




Harold C.

[camster]

The Engraving operation works with a Note - like a note from drafting.

If you want to cut lines and arcs then use planer mill and make ON boundaries. Set the cut pattern to Standard drive. Define the floor. You can use a negative floor stock or offset the floor into the part the depth of the "Engraving"

[weirdharold]

Kind of what I thought. I'll try method as you described.

Harold C.

[1 Infinite Loop]

Hi Harold,
It's Jim again and I thought I'd hit this thread too!

You can't engrave pictures in NX but you can engrave text quite nicely. Planar text is very straight forward and it's for engraving on flat surfaces and contour text is for 3-D surfaces.

For engraving I like to use single stroke drafting fonts. Here is my work flow, step by step: Start the drafting application and create a sheet, toggle the Display Sheet button (now the graphics window should look like you are in modeling, even though drafting is still active), create a block of text as would usually do in drafting. Go back into manufacturing and make a planar or contour text operation. You can select this block of text for the operation to cut and the rest of the operation settings should be familiar to you. By the way, in NX6 the operation just asks for text to select; there is no left, right or on. I have only used single stroke fonts so I can't say for sure how it handles other situations.

These engraving operations are really nice to use. I especially like the way you can specify multiple depth cuts and ramp engage moves. I can't remember the last time I snapped off an engraving tool. We use some 1/16" diameter balls but also use 1/32", 1/64" and sometimes use old-school 4-sided tools that range from .001"-.010" diameter with drafts ranging from 5 deg/s to 15 deg/s.

As for engraving images, well, NX can't do that yet as far as I know. Some of the other CAM softwares can do it but I think it's a case of NX customers have not asked for it much. Siemens uses a customer involvement process to add features and make changes to the software. I am not saying that nobody has asked for image engraving, rather that there may not be enough users asking for it. I have used NX since Unigraphics v9 or 10 (It's been a while so I can't remember exactly! I guess I need to start taking Geritol, lol.) and they have been great for gathering user input for changing things.

A little bit of trivia for those who may not be too familiar with NX legacy versions: NX1 would have been UG v19 so if we stayed with the old version convention NX would be at v24. (yeah, I'm a CAD/CAM geek!)

[markrief]

Originally Posted by weirdharold Being thing's are a little slow now, I thought I would try a little engraving with the text engraving-planer option in NX5. But when I try to select my geometry ( curves & splines ), I can't get it to select my geo. Only option's I see are , note's , label , & symbol . Is this option as it say's, "text" only or what am I doing wrong? The file is a logo I brought in with Adobe Illistrator & made it a "dxf " file . Thank's for any help in advance. Harold C.

As you haev seen, Text means drafting annotation only.

If you have text modeled as geometry, try surface contouring with the point/curve drive method.

Mark Rief
Siemens PLM

[LackyCnc]

Engraving? Could you substitute axis to output for 4th axis like mastercam does