aligning material

[Gusagus]

i'm still here in Iraq, and will soon be making that call to purchase my 2x2. had a question. i have messed around with auto cad 2010 a little while i'm here not really designing anything jsut getting a feel for what to expect useing CAD. my question isn't a CAD question, but lets say i have a 2x2 piece of metal in this thing i cut a bracket or what ever out. then i want to cut out my next project. do you move the material, change the CAD file to move the torch to a different section of the material, or can you manualy just move the gantry where you want it to start the next cut?

[MQYJ]

Originally Posted by Gusagus

manualy just move the gantry where you want it to start the next cut?

This.

When you jog the gantry you reset the 0,0 at whatever point you are at and the g-code always runs from the 0,0 point. I think I said that correctly.

Main thing is that the material doesn't need to be moved.

[Gusagus]

thanks for the reply, it did seem like it would be a pain to measure from 0,0 then redo a drawing for the next one. just wasn't sure if 0,0 was something that always started in the lower corner of the Machine or if 0,0 could be any where. i'm sure there will be a hugh learning curve for me since i'm not a big computer guy.

[LASER]

My advise is to draw the parts on the 2X2 material and work with the same drawing until the sheet is used. If you consistantly load the sheet you will have very little waste.

[HardcorewannabeXJ]

Originally Posted by Gusagus

thanks for the reply, it did seem like it would be a pain to measure from 0,0 then redo a drawing for the next one. just wasn't sure if 0,0 was something that always started in the lower corner of the Machine or if 0,0 could be any where. i'm sure there will be a hugh learning curve for me since i'm not a big computer guy.

You can do it either way. We have some customers who only cut one material, and leave it on their machine the entire time, so they can reference one CAD program and have everything ever cut out still on the screen to lay new parts in next to them.

This percentage of customers is extremely small, and although it seems like a good idea in practice, the amount of material lost by manually inserting parts with a new 0,0 point seems more efficient IMO. Especially if you are constantly changing sheets and materials, or moving the machine in the case of the 2x2.

[AlxJ64]

My plan is to save a file for each sheet of material that I have so that if I load a sheet onto the table it will have a matching file name. Then just open that file name and it will still have all of the previous parts cut as well as the past parts already cut. Will be easy for cutting parts out of a sheet that will eventually be used as a beadlock ring and minimize waste, somewhat atleast.