Visualizing Kerf Compensation Direction

[leonhart8888 (Phil Tsao)]

Hi All,

Is there a way to visualize the direction of kerf compensation in Lightburn? For example, whether it’s cutting a hole inside or outside?

Generally speaking this isn’t a big problem, but every now and then there is a shape that isn’t properly closed (for whatever reason). Being able to visualize the hole compensation direction would be a really useful feature and is something I’ve had experience when using waterjet on an OMAX machine for example.

If this already exists, please let me know how I can enable it.
If it doesn’t, I would love to see this as a feature request.

Thanks.

[thelmuth (Tim Helmuth)]

The way I do it is I duplicate the design and place it on it’s own layer and turn on perforation mode, then I add kerf offset to the work layer. Open the preview window. The perforated layer shows where your original design was and the solid line shows where the offset will be. You will probably have to zoom in on the preview to see the 2 lines. Then delete the duplicated layer before sending the project.

[leonhart8888 (Phil Tsao)]

That certainly works, but I was hoping there was a more elegant way to do this.

For reference, this is what the OMAX software shows for waterjetting.

It makes it very obvious that kerf compensation is happening inside the hole and not outside which would be a mistake.

[MikeyH (Mike Hembrey)]

You do not see this in Lightburn because the cut line is the laser beam width, not a waterjet width. Huge by comparison. The drawing line is a vector, which has no width.

[leonhart8888 (Phil Tsao)]

Yes it’s huge in comparison, but still relevant in terms of maximizing accuracy during kerf compensation.

I guess there’s no implementation of this currently…I’ll make a feature request ticket.