Cutting a 96" long sign on a 48" shopbot?

[Bagan]

I need a little help.

I have a 48x48 inch shopbot. I need to cut a sign that is 24" tall and 96" long. The sign has an arch across the top and I have figured out how I can cut half the arch and flip the material over and cut the other half. But The lettering has me a little puzzled

How do I re- align the material so that I can continue lettering the sign.

I considered using the shopbot to mark the center of the 96" dimension and then cutting the first half of the letters and then sliding the material aligning the mark with zero so I could cut the second half of the letters. This seems a little inaccurate??

I am sure there is a better approach and may be it already in the forum.

Anyway thanks

Dan

[mario]

Dan, if you have Partworks 3 there is a tile toolpath feature that allows you to break large pieces into smaller joint ready sections. I have used it a couple times on my smaller BT32 and it works really nice.

[CNYDWW]

I use a sled setup to work on material longer then the capacity of a cnc router.
The signs bellow are 6ft long and milled on a small machine with a capacity of 22x26. Using a piece of particle board with an applied fence in the machine, i mill the fence in steps with 1/4" holes milled with the machine on the fence at 24" on center. The program is broken up into tiles as mentioned before and using a 1/4" ball nosed end mill i align each section. If it was a Vcarved sign i'd simple use the v bit to engrave a line every 24".

Regards
Randy

[beacon14]

Can you pocket the background for the letters and cut the letters separately? Unless there is a way to seam it without having a seam through a letter that might be less noticeable.

[CNYDWW]

I actually pocketed the background on those signs with a .0625 stepover and a 1/4" ball nose bit with a pocket offset of .125. The program was setup to profile after and each tile was overlapped by .25. This created toolpaths that overlapped perfectly as long as i indexed the material properly through the machine. This gave the signs a vertical ribbed textured background without showing seams between each tile. Vcarving is much much easier. Each section is simply tiled and indexed and is much more forgiving. On a large sign, 1/16 or 1/32 of an inch off with indexing is very very hard to notice.