I'm new to CNC in general so I'll take any advice you can offer.  Thanks in advance.

I purchased Mach 3 and Lazycam and have started working with them for about 2 weeks now.  Mach 3 seems to be doing fine and I'm learing it ok.

I'm having a problem with Lazycam though.  I create a drawing in Adobe Illustrator, export as a DXF and it comes in at the wrong scale in Lazycam.

The project in Adobe Illustrator is roughly 8" wide.  When it comes into Lazycam and I have it filling the screen, the scale in the upper right hand corner shows 35.32.

How do I get this to scale properly without having to try to rescale after importing?

Greetings! I use an old copy of AutoCAD light called QuickCAD most of the time, but I still may be able to help with your problem... Be sure that you are saving the file in the format of AutoCAD Release 12. The same thing that happened to you also happened to me and that was the reason. I couldn't figure out why I couldn't pocket the letters in a 6" wide sign I was making. After importing the drawing, I found that the sign was only .32" wide. LazyCAM knows that an 1/8" cutter will not pocket the letters in a sign that size... I think that is were your problem could be... in the type of .dxf file your software is creating. May be someone who uses illustrator will respond with the proper settings in that software.

If this doesn't help or if you are still stumped, I'd recommend finding a cheap or free CAD program. Illustrator is a great program... maybe too great for the simple stuff we are doing here. I've used TurboCAD with some success. Dophin CAD was free on their web site. I recently bought RhinoCAD 3-D and it works great too.

I think I have found a (creative?) solution for this.


What I did was this....when I had my drawing done in Illustrator, I created a square around it of a given size (10" x 10" in my case).  This created an outter frame for a reference.

I imported the DXF into LCAM and Scaled the X and Y to 10 unis each.   Then delete the outter square.  This seems to make everything the proper scale as it was drawn in Illustrator.

I have not cut anything after doing this, but it seems to be a logical way to get the proper scale, and atleast on the screen seems right.  I hope this helps others that may have a similar issue.

I'm actually running into this problem as well. I create a model in solidworks 2005 and then create a drawing from it and save it as a dxf. When I import it into LazyCam 2.58, it scales it to a larger size. For instance, a .500 diameter circle becomes a 1.000 circle. Can anyone shed a little light on this for me please?

I'm new here and just bought a taig with Mach 3 and will be a regular "fixture" around here, I'm sure, as I'm completely new to the CNC world.

Thanks in advance for any info-

Dave


EDIT: I figured out that solidworks was simply scaling the dxf 2:1 so all I had to do was change it to 1:1 before importing it.