Joe621
10-05-2015, 11:04 AM
Greetings
First a little about us we are an in-house sign shop for a Theme park in Florida and until we purchased our Shopbot we would either send the job out to a local vendor our we would band saw and route our dimensional signs.
We installed our 96 x 60 prs alpha back in June or so and after a couple of tweaks and learning curve issues we have been using the bot for several different projects. Last week I had a very simple job of cutting some shapes job looked good in the vcarve preview took it to the cnc and the spindle would not turn on, strange so I tried a different job no problem that job cut fine so I thought it might be a vcarve issue so I reworked the job and again nothing. After racking my brain (what little I have left) I call support and discovered the issue was a new bit that I had added to the tool database in Vcarve Pro and gave it the number of 20 and on the shopbot tool #20 is for a second spindle so the second spindle that I don’t have was turning on. OK I guess that ones on me I have not read all of the programming documentation where they talk about numbering of tools but I assumed that if there were 50 tools available in the Vcarve database I could use all 50 on my shopbot.
So my question is what do you do? I have about 25 bits that I have already used so I can double up and have 2 different bits that have the same geometry but are for different materials but I also have the issue that I will not be the only person designing and running the machine. So what kind of system have any of you come up with to keep it at least a little organized. I don’t want to have several tool databases for Vcarve .
Oh you want may want to know we use everything in our shop. Foamed PVC is the most used but we do use some composite and solid pvc, wood and even aluminum and of course sign foam from 1” to 3 “.
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
Joe
First a little about us we are an in-house sign shop for a Theme park in Florida and until we purchased our Shopbot we would either send the job out to a local vendor our we would band saw and route our dimensional signs.
We installed our 96 x 60 prs alpha back in June or so and after a couple of tweaks and learning curve issues we have been using the bot for several different projects. Last week I had a very simple job of cutting some shapes job looked good in the vcarve preview took it to the cnc and the spindle would not turn on, strange so I tried a different job no problem that job cut fine so I thought it might be a vcarve issue so I reworked the job and again nothing. After racking my brain (what little I have left) I call support and discovered the issue was a new bit that I had added to the tool database in Vcarve Pro and gave it the number of 20 and on the shopbot tool #20 is for a second spindle so the second spindle that I don’t have was turning on. OK I guess that ones on me I have not read all of the programming documentation where they talk about numbering of tools but I assumed that if there were 50 tools available in the Vcarve database I could use all 50 on my shopbot.
So my question is what do you do? I have about 25 bits that I have already used so I can double up and have 2 different bits that have the same geometry but are for different materials but I also have the issue that I will not be the only person designing and running the machine. So what kind of system have any of you come up with to keep it at least a little organized. I don’t want to have several tool databases for Vcarve .
Oh you want may want to know we use everything in our shop. Foamed PVC is the most used but we do use some composite and solid pvc, wood and even aluminum and of course sign foam from 1” to 3 “.
Any help or ideas would be appreciated.
Joe