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Waterjet Group -> Programming & File Questions? -> Anyone ever experienced "crop circles"?
Post Info TOPIC: Anyone ever experienced "crop circles"?
Realrockdesign


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Anyone ever experienced "crop circles"?
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So I was cutting a circular grate out of 1" steel, about 20" across with a total of 64 arced slots with round ends. I drew this by drawing a pie shaped segment with the 4 slots decreasing in size towards the center, and then copy/paste/rotate 16 times till I had a complete circle. I zoomed to the max in autocad to ensure I had no broken lines or connected points with lines that overshot, basically from what I could tell a "clean drawing". The path ordered just fine in flowpath raising no indications of overlapping lines, incomplete objects etc. However at about 3/4 into the cutting, the flow decided to take its own toolpath and began cutting a random arc from the outer most slots in the 3 segments at the 22.5, 112.5 and the 135 deg positions. This doesn't make sense to me because if my drawing was flawed then this should have happened on all 16 segments, not just 3 Anyone ever have this happen? Remedies or certain types of drawings to look out for??

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zman0117


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first if you have a flow waterjet and programs that come with it, why would you use autocad for drawing the program? I have had this problem with programs before where they were made in another softwear and become a problem when cutting. My boss uses catia to draw things and when i bring it into flowpath i have to do lots of work and chase down problems with it. My advice is use flowpath when ever you can. a little time working with it and it is just as easy to draw then any other cad softwear out.



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OPTION WATERBOY


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software - zman


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TFabian


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make sure you don't have any radii in your program that are smaller than your offset diameter. That could cause this, as the program will freak out trying to figure out how to squeeze a .015" diameter jet into a .010" radius. You will see this a lot if your dxf comes from an EDM shop, where they often draw the features based on wire diameter.

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Matt Simpson


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Whenever you bring a DXF into Flow path make sure you purge the drawing for any single point entities and use your examine drawing tool, making sure that your examination properties reflect what combo you have set up for the cut. Examine drawing will usually always show an anomaly like the one you experienced with that cut. In the programming classes that we offer here at Flow we always stress to purge and use your examination tool before doing your pathing, that way you will catch any problems that may occur during the cut. Also as a final check in Flow Cut, after you apply the model you should go to the view menu and select draw both parts. That will show you the exact cut path the head will perform for the cut. Hope this helps.

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TAD


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 You mean something like this? Been running this program for over a year. Then bam. It's a Flow thing. No big deal. Just a 2' x 4' piece of 1/2" 304 Stainless Steel, 15 parts, and 75 minutes wasted. And that was  two months ago. Still no news. Happened two more times.

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Waterjet Group -> Programming & File Questions? -> Anyone ever experienced "crop circles"?
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