[Odizzle]

Hello CNC zone, I have a question about alphacam.
I am cutting some porous plywood and the vacuum doesn't hold as great as I would like. I want to cut all of the parts into my sheet stock down to .125 then go back and finish the parts. Problem I am having is when I program these separate operations and nest the parts Alphacam seems to just shrink the code down and it finishes each individual part separately. If anyone could let me know what I am doing wrong I would greatly appreciate it.

[ger21]

What I do is two operations. First operation cut's all the parts to the onion skin depth, and second operation cuts all the way through.

[jweinhold]

With in your tool path setup you can make the cut on as many passes as you like all in one step, going off of memory I beleive the most I have ever used was 10. If you select more than 1 pass you can choose to preform the cuts in equal increments or you can specify the depth of the first and last passes. You can also apply tags. What we do is machine down to about .01 or .005 of the full depth at that point you can usually break off the scrap.

[Odizzle]

Thank you for the replies, and sorry it's taken me so long to write back. It's been an... interesting week.

The way I programmed it is I would have, for example, operation 1 cut in multiple passes down to about 1/10. Then I would have operation 2 go through and finish the last 1/10 on all parts. Problem is when I nest my parts operations 1 and 2 get combined, I'm guessing to maximize cutting speed. So for example sheet 1 in my nesting order only has 1 operation. Is there a proper way to avoid this from happening?

I have a tool changer, so as a work around I programmed the final cut with a different tool slot. This prevented Alphacam from combining the operations, however for future knowledge this would be a good thing to know.

Thank you again.

[ger21]

I use a .dxf batch processing utility for AlphaCAM from SCM that does what you want. When it nests the parts, it onion skins small parts (based on user defined size in sq. in.). The first cut (not all the way through) is done on all the small parts, then the second pass is done. After all the small parts are done, larger parts are cut in one pass.

This allows us to cut a full sheet of small parts without them moving.

Without the utility, I think the way you're doing it is the best way.

[Odizzle]

OK, thank you much!