CN / small parts / tabs

[Damon Nabors]

Matt,

I was playing around with my ArtCam tonight and noticed that you can apply tabs to the toolpath. You can set how many you want, how thick, and how long. You can also cut those parts HPL side up by taking the outline of the part and mirror imaging the part, that should flip the image for you. If you want to try it, contact me and I would be glad to take one of your images and convert it with tabs for you and send you the file so you could test run it.

[Georgi Baltov]

As Brad mentioned it could get messy when you have a lot of parts with tabs on a sheet. I use it all the time and I solve it by selecting the direction of cut on the parts. Of course it's really time consuming and it depends on the complexity of parts. Again that extra time that is spent programming could pay off as you wouldn't need to re-cut any parts.

For me personally - double pass with some tabs on a part works perfect.