School me on single line fonts please

[762frmafr]

So, I have this brilliant Idea to do my business cards on the CNC plasma table. I have an engraver but the problem with that is it takes 13 minutes per card. That is just not cost effective. My next thought was to cut the letters with no offset as a single line. This would speed up the process considerably and offer me near the same effect. I am using a Hypertherm Powermax 65 with the finecut consumables and just can't seem to get it to work. A couple letters will come out ok but then it just starts turning in to ragged holes. I am using CorelDraw to design these cards. I have been told that letters the size I am wanting are possible on the machine that I own. I don't however want to have to purchase a single line font since I have CorelDrawX5 along with all the extra fonts that come with it. The material being cut is 16ga. I was running the machine at the voltage it says in the manual but slowing the speed down to 150 ipm. Also, my amperage was set at 45amps. Is this the correct setting for the finecut consumables? This is the first time I have messed with them. Any help or advice you could give would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.

[SignTorch Vector Art]

truetype fonts cannot have open paths so they cannot have a single line that does not somehow trace back to where it started so any font in corel (or windows) is not a single line font

there are single stroke fonts that work with certain software, like autocad has stroke fonts for pen plotters, and various engraving software supports single stroke fonts

one way to try to get a single stroke is write out some text in a really thin font then export a raster image then do a centerline trace on that, you might have to break up any intersections to make the trace take the best route

[762frmafr]

truetype fonts cannot have open paths so they cannot have a single line that does not somehow trace back to where it started so any font in corel (or windows) is not a single line font

there are single stroke fonts that work with certain software, like autocad has stroke fonts for pen plotters, and various engraving software supports single stroke fonts

one way to try to get a single stroke is write out some text in a really thin font then export a raster image then do a centerline trace on that, you might have to break up any intersections to make the trace take the best route

Sign torch, I tried what you are talking about. I was not happy with the results. So you are telling me that even if I buy the fonts linked below, import them in to Corel and then export them back to a DXF, that it still won't work?

http://www.signtorch.com/store/DXF-Stick-Font-1.html

[Team Tracker]

Garys single line fonts will work perfect. Basically each letter is a drawing and these drawings can be put together in Corel or other programs to spell out whatever you want. These are not a Truetype fonts that would find in your fonts drop down menu in Corel however they will do exactly what you want.

[762frmafr]

Garys single line fonts will work perfect. Basically each letter is a drawing and these drawings can be put together in Corel or other programs to spell out whatever you want. These are not a Truetype fonts that would find in your fonts drop down menu in Corel however they will do exactly what you want.

And how small of letters do you think I could "cut" with that "font"?

[Team Tracker]

Best thing to do is lay out a couple letters in Corel and set the line width to the width of your kerf and you will be able to see if the starting and ending points of the cuts are running into each other. These Signtorch fonts used with your scribe will of course allow you to get much smaller and since they are single line your processing time will be reduced a lot on each card.

[762frmafr]

I guess I am spending $11 tomorrow and seeing if it will work. Unless anyone else has some input.

[Team Tracker]

it will be $11 well spent.

[762frmafr]

it will be $11 well spent.

I am not disputing that at all. Just hate to do it after buying Corel.

[SignTorch Vector Art]

If it makes you feel better I spent at least 11 hours on it, and threw photoshop, corel draw and v-carve pro at it, and recently lowered the price from 33

[762frmafr]

If it makes you feel better I spent at least 11 hours on it, and threw photoshop, corel draw and v-carve pro at it, and recently lowered the price from 33

Like I said, I am not disputing the quality of work, nor the effort you put in to it, I am just saying, I spent all that money on a design program and need to turn around and spend more.

[762frmafr]

So, I bought the font from SignTorch. Attached is the DXF that I tried to cut. It still will not cut correctly, and it is taking 10 minutes and 48 seconds to engrave instead of 13 minutes and 15 seconds. Which is still an unacceptable amount of time. Can anyone help?

[JJsCustomDesigns]

Goto OfficeMax and buy 500 Matte Business cards and print them out.

You should prob delete your atachment if its got bought SignTorch fonts in it. I dont think he likes giving that stuff away

[762frmafr]

Goto OfficeMax and buy 500 Matte Business cards and print them out.

That is not the object of this exercise. But thank you for your once again useless input in one of my threads.

[JJsCustomDesigns]

Goto OfficeMax and buy 500 Matte Business cards and print them out.

That is not the object of this exercise. But thank you for your once again useless input in one of my threads.

Good luck on your project, smartass. I dont know many people that would carry around a METAL business card. i think your "trying" to re-invent the business card. Keep it simple is all i meant.

[762frmafr]

Goto OfficeMax and buy 500 Matte Business cards and print them out.

That is not the object of this exercise. But thank you for your once again useless input in one of my threads.

Good luck on your project, smartass. I dont know many people that would carry around a METAL business card. i think your "trying" to re-invent the business card. Keep it simple is all i meant.

It's a good thing you don't know many people.

[JJsCustomDesigns]

You are no one special here-- niether am i but if you step on too many peoples toes. There wont be anyone left to help you.

This should be the end of this conversation between me and you. Good luck on your brilliant business card idea.

[muzza]

Reply edited

Good luck with your idea

[CNCCAJUN]

This may be of help to you. . . .

A very large high tech fab shop located here in Louisiana that happens to have (2) huge Trumpf Laser Tables decided to make their business card out of stainless steel. They were brush finished & looked fantastic. I think I still have one, "SOMEWHERE" . . . . I actually took it out of a box that had hundreds of them on the shop floor that was for scrap.
I asked why they were throwing them away. The guy on the shop floor said the owner took them to a trade show and was handing them out. He stopped after one of his customers stopped by. After handing it to him, the customer said . .

"what the hell am I going to do with this, you have a million dollar laser table and you are going to give me a *$#*ing business card" . . .

The owner now gives out laser cut alligator shaped bottle openers with his company name on it. Every one keeps those . . . . I still have mine . . . . lol lol lol

My 2 cents . . .
Steve

[planetxfred]

All that aside, What I see is that you have about 45 inches of cutting path length. For plasma cutting, that is a lot of heat input in such a small space. Multiple lines very close together spell trouble.
I would consider much thinner material, reduced amps and speed as high as the machine can handle, A while back I used finecut nozzle at 20 amps and200 inches per min to cut .015 shim stock (with pretty good results) Hypertherm powermax 1000.
Remember what you are selling. A poor result given out as a sample will not bring in much.
I cannot offer much on engraving as I have not done that on my machine.
Fred

[SignTorch Vector Art]

there are a few issues/problems here

1) there's only 46.4" of lines there, taking 10 minutes means about 4 ipm average speed, I assume your speed is set higher than that so something is slowing it down, I assume you must not have constant velocity on, and or I assume there must be a lot of points being plotted to slow it down that much

2) why is there a lot of points? I assume there are spline curves being digitized into thousands of points, lots of cnc software breaks splines into thousands of points, because there is no other gcode to follow a spline, gcode and many cnc machines only work with lines and arcs

3) why are there splines? two reasons: a) you scaled the geometry unproportionally, anything that was an arc became an ellipse (not an arc any more), b) even if you didn't scale it, corel draw does not do arcs, all arcs became splines on import, and the dxf you exported is all splines

4) not knowing the nature of the engraving software, whether it uses gcode or hpgl or has constant velocity or not or how it handles splines, hard to say why it goes so slow

5) On paper, the original dxf font on the right could almost cut correctly at that size, while your scaled version on the left intersects itself, the center would fall out



what can be done?

1) don't scale the letters unproportionally and don't use corel so as to preserve the arcs

2) or in corel, export an early DXF version without splines, and have constant velocity on the machine, or use dxf tools to export dxf with arcs

3) or go to OfficeMax and buy 500 Matte Business cards and print them out

[vmax549]

OK I looked at your drawing and it appears that you will never get that to cut correctly. Your elements are way too close together. Remember the cut curf is at least .060" wide so it would be like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with a 6" paint brush.

Even IF you moved you elements apart(then your card is too big) to make it work dimension wise HEAT would be your next problem with such a small part. You would have to use a cut and wait strategy. Cut one line then wait 10-20 secs then cut the next line. Each part would end up taking a LONG time to cut.

Next I dought your machine has the presision to cut exact lines and as the machine wonders a touch it destroys the seperation of the elements you have drawn WHEN you are working so tightly grouped.

I have cut a lot of small designs in 16g steel and I would not even TRY something like what you have drawn. Experience tells me it won't work.

Just a thought, (;-)

[beefy]

Here's a picture of the card with a 1.3mm kerf width. As you can see a lot of the card is going to get vaporised. This image does not take into account each pierce point which will make things even worse. Like Terry said it doesn't seem worth attempting. Another problem I can see is that a lot of the holding tabs for letter like A and P will get vaporised so these letter would be left with holes in them.

I'd love to know what plasma cutter has a tiny nozzle that runs of very low amps and has a very narrow kerf width. I'm sure a lot of us plasma guys could make use of such a cutter.

Regarding your comment to JJsCustomDesigns. There are much less aggressive ways to reply to comments. I've had a few replies to my questions on various forums that I would have considered not on subject or even completely shooting off in another direction. I either don't respond or I keep my reply pleasant and diplomatic, unless they turn nasty first.

I don't know what your other threads/posts are like but in this one you seem quicker to show aggression and irritation more than thanks and appreciation.

Plus at some point(s) you could get some good information from him but now that bridge is burnt.

[JJsCustomDesigns]

I think he's using a plate marker for the lettering

[trucutcnc]

I'd love to know what plasma cutter has a tiny nozzle that runs of very low amps and has a very narrow kerf width. I'm sure a lot of us plasma guys could make use of such a cutter.

The TD UltraCut can go all the way down to 5 amps and with the right marking software installed on the controller, can "scribe" a mark that looks like it was done with a carbide scribe. There is nothing in the conventional plasma market that can do the job. I'm sure the Hypertherm HPR has the same capability.