[mattpatt]

Hi Guys,

Seem to be having grief with some laser cutting shops.

After a recent heated discussion at my usual vendor I've been speaking with a couple of new laser cutting shops and they're having trouble with my DXF or DWG files.

I am saving the solid model as either a DXF or DWG file, selecting version R12 and exporting splines as polylines (I knew already that they didn't want splines), but still they are saying their software can't handle polylines either.

When I re-open the DXF file in Solidworks and create a part from it, and measure the polyline, some of the segments are less than 0.1mm in length. This is with the "annotation views" option selected. If I chose the "faces/loops/edges" the shortest lines are as small as 0.006mm.

If I open the DXF or DWG file in SW DWGeditor then I can explode the polyline to just a series of lines. But with so many parts that will need this done it will take an age, and just wondered if there's any way to skip the polyline during the "save as DWG or DXF" and move straight to lines.

Any/all help greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Matt.

[oldhaitianrat]

I understand your problem. Until we upgraded our laser software, we got very "unpredictable" results when a customer provided a CAD file with a spline entity. It was very difficult to explain to a designer and we too had "tough discussions". Our latest software version really does an excellent job. As a matter of fact, we can import the customer's raw CAD data (including splines) and then export the newly created laser file as a .dxf and it will actually convert the data to a series of tiny lines that very closely approximates the original data. There's hardly ever a reason to do this, but sometimes the profile may need to be edited "outside of SolidWorks" and this allows us to do that with ease! I'd be happy to convert a SolidWorks to CAD sample for you or quote cutting the part out-right.
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