I don’t have a rotary yet. Looking to see if I can take on a job, with long term possibilities. Trying to see if anyone can walk me through engraving 3 sides of a rectangle. Can I program it to engrave side 1, rotate 90°, engrave side 2, rotate 90° and engrave side 3 and achieve a virtually seamless engraving.
Hope this makes sense…
And maybe its one of those things that if i had one, it might be clearer when programming.
The answer is no, because the rotary replaces your Y axis so there would not be a way to get anything other than a single scan line repeatedly. If you had a large focal range lens you could have a small area of the flat that would be in focus enough to get a good engrave. Now if you had a Galvo machine this might be possible.
EDIT - NO, I was wrong! - as above, the Y axis is replaced by the rotary.
I would rather put the rectangle flat on the burn board and flip it over between runs. A piece of cardboard tacked to a flat board is used to make the jig. Cut an outline out of the cardboard about .2mm larger than the cube/block. lift the cube, rotate and drop the cube back into place.
The rectangles have radius corners/edges on the X axis…
This would be on a Mopa if i take on the job.
The radius edges add a degree of difficulty. I think what you’re proposing just isn’t possible, but people didn’t think the light bulb was possible either.
I know how to achieve this on a mill with a 4th axis and Solidworks HSM, just not sure on this one and Lightburn… maybe EZcad? Anyone speak on that?
I would build a fixture to hold three of the items with their engraving faces up, and then rotate the items through the three ‘stations’ upon each run of a job that engraves each of the three unique faces (one at each station).
With this setup you would have three loading sequences (rotating the items through the stations) for every three items completely processed. The same as if you loaded items one at a time into a rotary setup, which as you’ve found above, won’t work.
Bonus points for making your three station jig into a rotating lazy susan type setup where you load the three objects, run the job, spin it one position, run the job, and spin and run once more.
Extra, extra bonus points for a high volume setup that is worth the effort of motorizing the rotating stations fixture and triggering the rotations via toggling of an air assist (or other) output.
I did a similar thing with a turn table, just for fun. The only thing you would need to change is the orientation of that axis. I have a short demonstration here:
There is also a link to a more elaborate description. So you could design it to have the rotary as z-axis and do 90° turns every step.
But you can’t change the design per side using this method, it would repeat the same design on each side.
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