First off, I'm super new at this and am only in the beginning stages of wrapping my head around the software. But I have a question that maybe someone has a simple solution for? We got a 1515 for milling a substrate to match screw holes in some galvanized steel we have done elsewhere. (we don't want to deal with cutting galvanized steel, and anyway that's a whole different machine) But the issue is that the steel we get back from the shop does not precisely match the .ai files that we sent to them to set up for the steel cuts. They're .ai files because they come from an artist who did our designs in Illustrator. The steel shop requested the .ai files which they presumably converted to CAD. When we try to match up the screw holes they all line up perfectly on one end, but by the time we get to the other end everything is off by about 1/8". We're converting our files from the original .ai to G-Code using VCarve. The steel shop is cutting the actual design, and screw holes for fasteners, and we're cutting those holes in the substrate with the 1515. Is the variance we're experiencing simply an issue from converting the .ai to CAD? They say it must be, and when we sent them the G-Code files, they could immediately see they were out of alignment. Any suggestions, or is our only real solution to tweak every file to bring the holes into alignment as close as we can? We have a lot of different designs, so this will be a bit tedious, to say the least. From what I understand, these designs have some elements that would make designing them in AutoCAD pretty challenging, or at the least very time-consuming. Thanks for any advice! Derek
I'm not sure why a simple design to cut holes would be a problem for a cad program - can you show us a pic of the finished metalwork? Is .ai the only format they can accept? That's unusual for a fabricator and I'm pretty certain they are converting them to their cad format. Alex.
Is your machine calibrated? (CONTROL > Wizards and Tools menu > Calibration) Does the physical dimensions of their cut align with the drawing (if not you should ask them to recut for free).
As for calibrated... a **** good question! We had someone helping us get set up, and to be honest I don't recall if we did that or not. Chalk that up to newbie ignorance, and certainly something we should do again whether we did it before or not. Regarding the physical dimensions... another good question. That's not something we can easily confirm here, because we provided the substrate dimensions to the artist who created the .ai files. All he needed to do was make sure the design would fit the substrate with an approximate 1" border on all sides. (the design is not always linear, so the border refers to the outermost sections of the design) I can't open the .ai files because I don't have Illustrator so I can't confirm the actual dimension but I can find out from a relative who has Illustrator. But I suspect if there is an error there, the shop may just blame it on the conversion from .ai to CAD. They didn't appear quite as keen to be doing cuts from a design that wasn't created in AutoCAD to begin with, but given the volume we need to have cut, and the fact that the steel is galvanized limited our options as we needed a facility who could control the fumes safely and these guys are set up for that.
True but tip for next time. Add a "reference square" to your drawings. 100*100mm square, with words "this is a reference 100x100mm square. Use this to check scaling when working with our files". That gives you a foot to stand on if they do mess up, because it really isnt a good excuse. Conversions doesn't magically change scale, and checking the dimensions on source and converted file takes what 5 seconds. Adding that square and a "please always check scale" to the order email is a good practice.
