Need Help!- Cutting techniques

[mrpham]

Hello guys ive just recently purchased myself a 3 axis CNC machine from Excitech. the whole world of cnc is all new to myself so i still got alot to learn. i bought this machine believing that it will increase of quality of work and time to manufacture. i would definitely say the quality has improved a lot but the time taken to manufacture a product has increased significantly.
Currently i'm cutting a trimming on a piece of MDF which is 2440x1220x17 im using two drill bits to run this process, firstly a 3.75 tips which is being used to do all the detailing, and a a 8mm drill bit which is used for cutting. the whole process to cut the board has taken up 30hrs of production time just to cut 13 pieces of trimming from one piece of MDF. im pretty sure that there is a more efficient way of running this trim but i've yet to figure it out. so if anyone can share with me some ideas or techniques to reduce the time taking to cut this i would much appreciate this. ive also upload the image of the trim im running. the finish product is 8cm wide

[ger21]

1)What software is generating the code? Is it from a 3D model, or a 2D drawing?

2) how are you getting the square corners?

3)How fast are you cutting?

[mrpham]

the software that im using is artcam 7 to write the program
and the blade that is cutting the squares is the small 3.75mm blade.
i used that blade to get square corners
feed rate of the 3.75mm tip is 8000mm/min and the spin is 24000rpm

[forest]

One thing that you could do to streamline your cutting process is to only use the 3.75mm cutter to do the corners on the larger cutouts. This would save alot of run time with the smaller bit and shorten your overall machine time.

[CanSir]

I don't know about ArtCAM 7, but ArtCAM Pro has a trick or two that should speed things up for you. Skip the first 1/3 of this tutorial and focus on the last two thirds where they show using multiple toolbits. ArtCAM only uses the smaller bits in areas the bigger bits can't reach. The faster feed rates of the larger bit doing more of the work should dramatically reduce your cut times.
http://www.artcam.com/videos/2008/fl..._Sengrave.html

ArtCAM Pro also has an optimize feature that analyzes the toolpath and looks for ways to minimize direction changes. In the demo video I saw, it cut the machining time down to well over half.

You'll have to sell a lot of MDF trim to pay for ArtCAM Pro though so if you can't do similar stuff in the version you already own then it may not be worth upgrading. Maybe post your question in the ArtCAM forum here or on ArtCAM's website and see what suggestions the experts can offer.