How to speed up cutting time for Words - Fonts

[coolhammerman]

Friends, I will be making a line of Folk Art style signs with a 4896 PRT with the G4 upgrade. I am looking for a way to significantly speed up carving including the bible verses on the signs. I am doing a lot of V Carving using Engraver, Comic and Arial fonts. A typical sign 24 x 24 takes 23 minutes. I'd like to see that cut in half. Below are some snapshots to give you a better idea.


I can email you the JPEG's if necessary.

Specs:
60 deg sign bit 1/2"
2.7 ips
Z .9 ips
safe Z .2"
Tool path for "V" Carving


8662
8663

8664

8665


Any Ideas and suggestions would be very helpful.
Ron

[harryball]

Have you tried speeding up the Z? I've run my files at Z speeds of 2 and 3 ips with good results. I know it depends on the depth of cut, but these letters don't look that deep.

Beyond that you'd have to mess with ramp speeds, cornering speeds and such. I've done a little of that but others on the board know far more than me. I know just enough to be dangerous but do tweek these speeds cautiously to see what happens.

Robert

[rcnewcomb]

1) See if you can run with a smaller safe Z. perhaps only 0.1 above the material surface.

2) I haven't tried them yet but single-stroke fonts may cut faster as well.

3) Look at your overall toolpath. Can you increase your jog speeds? How much time is spent when it moves from one letter to the next?

[coolhammerman]

Thanks Gentlemen. I will try each of these.

Randall, I'm not familiar with a "Single-stroke font". Tell me more. This sounds like it may be the answer I'm looking for.
Ron

[coolhammerman]

Randall,
I've done some digging around and discovered that I do indeed have several "single-line" fonts available. Thanks for the tip.
Ron

[jsfrost]

What tools do you use to generate the toolpath? If you have multiple options, one may be more efficient than others. VCP will probably V carve in fewer strokes than PW.

Look at how the SB moves when it cuts. If there are long moves back and forth that appear un-necessary, you may be able to minimize this by editing the individual vector elements in your project in an ordered sequence. Cutting sequence is often related to editing sequence.

[coolhammerman]

Jim:
There have always been long seemingly unnecessary moves when cutting verses and/or the closed vectors for the animals, etc. It doesn't matter what the font is.

I am doing so many small quantities that the programing time required to correct it seems excessive. So for now until the production gets into full swing, I'll choose the lesser of two evils and just change the font to a single-stroke font.

I have run some "Single-Stroke Font" tests mentioned earlier in a post from Randall with great success! The 10 Commandments pictured above went from 27:37 with Comic font to 11:13 sec. Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

The answer was in choosing the correct font. Big thanks to Randall. Thanks to everyone else too. Problem solved.

As an aside, when I run a single-stroke font, I must choose "machine on vector" rather than "V" carving since all vectors are open by definition. For my purposes, I think .0875 depth of cut will work fine.

Thanks again,
Ron

[menewfy]

this was a helpful read thanks to everyone who posted, i do however have a question relating to this.

what are some examples of single line fonts or is it a setting before I get into the font page?

[coolhammerman]

Tim:
I found mine in my tool pathing software. Trial and error, but there are about 6 that are single line. The fonts are very software specific and all are NOT TrueType fonts. None of the TT fonts were single line.

I gather from other strings and from discussions on other boards that single-stroke fonts are really hard to come by.

You can do a somewhat passable job using CAD software, I use DeltaCad. When you export the text as either DXF or DXT save line weight rather than entity type. I found the curves to be short line segments and pretty jagged.

Anyone else have a good source for single-stroke fonts?
Ron

[menewfy]

thanks ron I will see what I can find
Tim

[coolhammerman]

Wow! Just when you thought you knew it all, something else to learn. OK, so by using single-stroke non True Type fonts one can reduce the machine time by approximately 50% over the standard Engraver or Comic or Times Roman True Type closed vector fonts. And that is really worth knowing sometimes.

Well! I discovered another trick to cut that time in half again. As I watched my PRT G4 cut the single stroke fonts, I realized they were mostly a series of straight lines - disconnected straight lines. A lower case "a" took 7 strokes! ARRRGH!!! So, I joined all of the vectors with coincident points and fitted them to Arcs and viola! My original 30 minute cut reduced to 17 minutes, then reduced again to about 10 minutes. A savings of 2/3s. That is not insignificant. In fact, my venture is now actually viable with the reduced machine time.

Thanks again. Hope this helps you all too.
Ron

[rcnewcomb]

Thanks for the update. This is good stuff.