Replying to the questions about the samples used in Cut2D.
I did some work on this program when it was in Beta, in fact the loco wheel and con rod are my files that Vectric asked if they could be included.
Don't know who supplied the rocket file or if it was to be for wood or metal.
The loco wheel and conrod were done for metal, can't remember the time for the first operation of the wheel but the latter one, the spokes it took us 1 hour 13 minutes to cut but I dropped a goolie as I cut a blank out of stainless steel instead of mild steel and when on site at Leicester testing the new Sieg KX1, only a small mill, it was too late to do anything with it other than drop the feeds and speeds down to save the cutters.
Having said that I thought it did a marvelous job to cut stainless on a small machine like this.
Some things I noticed with the program that was reported back to Vectric were wasted moves which they were going to look into. The worst was it sets a default Z hight to about 10mm if in metric and raises the cutter to this hight after every cut. It then sends the cutter back into the cut at Z feed rate which for metal can be slow. In our case 10mm at 70mm / min just to get back to the top of the work and then to go another 5mm to get back to where it started before it puts the next cut on.
That's a lot of air time.
We compromised after the test cut by setting the Z clearance plane to 2mm which made a lot of difference.
I feel that it's all a trade off against ease of use and cost compared to a optimised toolpath.
I have to cut a load of washer like blanks out of a sheet of plastic and programmed this up in Cut2D last night, cycle time for 24 out of 10mm thick Tufnol is 36 minutes which I find acceptable as I'm doing something else anyway.
I may have been able to shave a few minutes off this job in another program but it would have took a lot longer then the 5 minutes it took to get the code out in Cut2D.
John S.