Hi all,

Although I have been using Autocad for about fifteen years now, I am very new to Lazycam and Mach 3.  I made a simple drawing consisting of 4 chains, one of them being an object consisting of one Pline, and the other two being circular holes in this object.  When I bring the DXF into Lazycam, the Pline shows up in multiple colors, green for the arced parts of it, and blue for the straight line parts of it.  I was wondering if this matters.

Secondly, when I bring this into Mach 3, the circles do not show up and the tool path consists of erratic loops.
I tried eliminating the circles and just using the Pline, which worked.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Post the drawing and the dxf.
RICH

Try changing the IJ mode in general config to incremental.

I was wondering if this matters.

Not really and there is no way to change the default displayed colors that I am aware of.

RICH

Thanks for the replies.  I'm not entirely sure of what I might have done, but I am not experiencing problems with erratic tool patterns when sending circles into MAch 3 anymore.

I should also preface this posting by mentioning, for clarity purposes, that I am using Lazycam for a plasma cutter.

Attached is a .LCam file of what I am working on.  Another problem that I am encountering is that in Autocad this drawing consists of only four objects, the three circles and the flange shape that contains them (and I can't remember, but this file might also include a box that I put around them for scaling purposes), Lazycam, while recognizing the same amount of objects (noting them as chains), says that the outer flange shape is made up of 12 entities.  I am concerned that this will cause my machine to produce the shape with jerking start/stop motions, as opposed to a smooth, consistent speed.  Any ideas regarding how to have this pline reduced to one entity?

Thanks in advance for any replies.   

post the .dxf file

Here it is.

There are 12 segments to the polyline. The number of segments shouldn't make any difference, as long as you're using CV mode.
You could reduce it to 8 segments, by drawing a closed 4 sided polygon and using the fillet command to add the radii to the corners, but it really shouldn't matter.

I had problems with you dxf in that I could not create offsets properly. So i redrew over the top of your flange and here are the results when postedto Mach.
Maybe LC likes me......!
I have never used or tested the Plasma mode of LC so can't commnet on it and you will not find anything in the manual about it.
RICH

BTW, If i explode your polyline it works. I don't use polylines for LC or LT.
RICH