Choosing a Dust Collector

[ikarasu]

Interesting, I've never heard of such an animal. Seems like a really cool concept.

I spent 6 hours straight the other day fighting with routing small pieces on our Summa F. Closest thing to a solution I've found is adding application tape to the back of sheets and using 1/8" MDF as a spoilboard, even then the results aren't ideal. Vacuum just doesn't always have enough hold down to keep small pieces from drifting on the final cut, and no option to add tabs in our software. I might have to experiment a bit with adding tabs in our files manually and see how that works w/ cleanup etc.

What CNC are you thinking of getting? And what materials do you cut?

Multicams all come with a pressure plate.... It doesn't hold the part in place, it just applies pressure so the part doesn't vibrate up / down and cause chatter. Its good to have, but does nothing to prevent the part from flying or moving.


Tabs is what most people use.... But its very slow.mainly.fir people cutting wood as wood tab cleanup is easy. Cutting 100 pieces on a 5x10 sheet of aluminum with tabs, even skin tabs requires a lot of after cutting prep.... Not just after the pieces are cut, but getting them off the table and loading another sheet as you have to pull each piece apart.


Vacuum works the best IMO - vacuum and common sense... You nest everything together and choose the starting point on every piece. Never cut a piece where the end cut won't be holding onto the sheet - we can cut small 6" x 6" with our vacuum table if we set the file up properly. Takes 5-10 more mins to setup the nest, but you can do that while the current sheet is cutting. Really small parts you do 2 pass.... With it going almost all the way just leaving a skin, then the second pass removes the skin... There's way less torque since its only cutting a really thin piece, and that allows the table to hold down properly.


Lots of tips and tricks to get vacuum tables to work perfectly.... Once you get a workflow down, its great.


For software we use enroute. Think its $120 a month on subscription.

 

[JBurton]

Really small parts you do 2 pass.... With it going almost all the way just leaving a skin, then the second pass removes the skin... There's way less torque since its only cutting a really thin piece, and that allows the table to hold down properly.

Also worth noting, if you have a whole sheet of something like 3/4" letters, cut the whole sheet of letters to .72, then cut each one out. This way, the torque is reduced well before the sheet begins to get smaller, reducing the hold down pressure.
In fact, when I'm trying to hurry, I'll set up the first layer and let it start. Then I'll go back and pick each start point while the machine is running the first pass, so I'm not holding anything up by selecting each start point.

For those wanting to avoid subscriptions, sheetcam is $150 once, and its more reminiscent of 'old school' cad programs, no wasted gpu/cpu on 3d rendering there! Also, it can add acceleration parameters that enroute and vcarve were both unable to produce.

 

[johnnysigns]

What software are you using? Man I can't wait to get a real CNC & software. Routing on our Summa F has become a real chore and the software is just brutal to work with.

We're using V-carve pro for tooling our stuff. Most of my art is supplied in illustrator and we import AI/PDFs into V-carve to program all the tool pathing.

 

[johnnysigns]

Interesting, I've never heard of such an animal. Seems like a really cool concept.

I spent 6 hours straight the other day fighting with routing small pieces on our Summa F. Closest thing to a solution I've found is adding application tape to the back of sheets and using 1/8" MDF as a spoilboard, even then the results aren't ideal. Vacuum just doesn't always have enough hold down to keep small pieces from drifting on the final cut, and no option to add tabs in our software. I might have to experiment a bit with adding tabs in our files manually and see how that works w/ cleanup etc.

If you can put on a temporary spoilboard you can always cover it in tile gasket for small parts. TG is made to be cut into ever so slightly. It does work really well to focus the broader vacuum coverage to a single hole and concentrate the hold down. As long as you're dilligent when you set your Z height with the TG spoilboard it should provide some decent life. We ran another 6 months on our bed after we cut the small parts program. The foam they use also stuck to poly and paper liner acrylic after each cycle. We had to pop parts out off the bed as the suction made the foam stick to the protective liner.

 

[fixtureman]

I built a Thien seperator for my HF dust collector and it works really good.