[coherent]

I've helped a few folks "clean up" their cad drawing for use with a CNC machine. I'm sure folks who are professional drafts-persons or learned Autocad at a school or other professional organization learn most of these things, but a lot of CNC folks here are self taught and learned Autocad by trial and error. Duplicate lines etc, can be hard to locate and select. They tend to increase your file size and cause lots of issues when you try to run the part with a CNC machine. I've been surprised that many folks aren't familiar with the "overkill" command in Autocad. Give it a try! The default settings work well for most issues and will quickly clean up your drawings. In older versions the command was part of the Express Tools... in later versions it's located in the home tab/modify panel, or you can just type it in.

[ajclay]

That is one I've overlooked for sure. Never seen it or even heard of it. I've learned not to have the problem from the use of good drawing habits and the correct use of O-Snaps.. Paid my dues that's for sure...

The only time I struggle now is when someone gives me a drawing that's out of an "art" program that saves the drawing as a dxf. "overkill" will come in handy.

Another big issue is open contours... That's another problem I wish there was a way for autocad to report or find them in drawings...

Thanks for the tip!!

AJ

[ger21]

Another big issue is open contours... That's another problem I wish there was a way for autocad to report or find them in drawings...

If the entities are all polylines, you can select them all and look at the properties window.
If the closed property is blank, then there are both open and closed polylines. If it says "yes", then they're all closed. And "No" means all open.

[ajclay]

That is true, but wonder if it says that it's not closed...? And there are a lot of segments, curves, arcs..... The only way I know is to brake it all apart.... explode, and start forming a polyline in sections at a time to locate the brake.... It's still time consuming at best sometimes...

Thanks, AJ

[Bigums]

Is there a way to do this with lines that are really close to each other, but unnecessary? We have a FARO Arm at our shop that outputs the .igs file and puts a line for each point picked on the object we are measuring. We haven't figured a way to fix the way the arm outputs its geometry, but if there was a way to condense lines on autocad that would make our function usable.

For example, the lines will output within +/- .0001 of each other, but our tolerances are +/- .005 for our prints. The program will output 10 lines within the +/- .0001 tolerance which is absolutely ridiculous so cleaning the drawing up is extremely time consuming.

Is there a way to condense these lines into an average of one?