Can anyone help with drainer grooves (5 straight)on Alphacam. My guy has gone sick and I cannot get them working.

Jeff,

Sorry, we don't use Alphacam. Do you have AutoCAD also? I may be able to guide you through making the lines have a slope in AutoCAD. Then you could import them into AlphaCAM and see if you could get that to work. If you think this would work, give me a call 717-917-3259. Sorry to hear you're in a bind

Have a nice day,
Seth

Hi Seth, Many thanks for your reply. We are based in the UK but we will call you asap. Best regards, Jeff

Seth, you are a top man, we got it working thanks to you. Sorry if we delayed your snow clearing. I owe you a beer. Cheers, Jeff

Hello Jeff,

I was at the show and just got back. For the future, I work with AlphaCAM so if you have any questions, just let me know.

Seth is always a big help and probably know more about CAD than I ever will so you were in good hands.

Post a picture of the drainboard if you get a chance.

Thanks , Jeff and Andy, for the compliments. I've learned a lot from everyone here. I'm glad to hear things worked out with the drainboard. No, Jeff, you didn't delay my shoveling - I needed a break. This stuff has been hard to keep up with, and now there is no use shoveling because the winds have picked up.

Hi Andy/Seth, Hot off the CNC last night our first effort at straight, curved and curly, (just because we could)

Jeff,

What version of AlphaCAM are you using?

Andy, we are using v5. Did you get the pic I PMd to you?

No sir, I didn't get any picture. Can you resend to either the PM or olivemill at gmail.com

Thanks

Hi Andy, I think we've cracked it!

How did you do it? I can do a straight line, but when I do a curve it creates to many points along the line to define. Real pain.

I got your picture, can I post it under one of your posts?

Hi andy, Please post the picture. Jeff

Jeff,

I'm glad to hear that you have been experimenting with different shapes. Send me some pics if you get a chance. seth77@ptd.net

Andy,

We were having trouble with "stepping" issues when we were doing curved "racetrack" drainboards, but that was taken care of when we starting drawing multi-segmented (about 400 little lines in a half-"circle") polygons instead of arcs. Somewhere between the CAM software and the CNC controller, things had not been working out in the program when the machine was trying to rout a radius moving in the x, y, & z axes simultaneously.

Have a good one,
Seth

What?  My head hurts.  Give me a router and a template and leave the aspirin in the drawer.

Johnny C

I have not been able to actually get one cut or even attempted to send the info to the CNC. I haven't gotten out of AlphaCAM yet.

Here is the samples Jeff did.  I am uploading the picture on his behalf.