Cutting same pocket several times

[Norm Zurawski]

I am working on a router base for my Ryobi P600 cordless router. I am using acrylic and cutting a pocket to mount a Porter Cable style guide in it. I run my pocket program 4 times to make the depth I want, meaning I start the laser 4 times to do this. Wondering how would get Coral Draw to repeat this in one program? So I send the program over and the machine makes 4 passes in one run. Not that it takes that long anyway. I use to make this stuff using my CNC router but want to learn this laser.

[Gary Hair]

Does your laser driver have a "Start Immediately" option? I have the option of sending the job to my laser and manually pressing the start button or I can have that option selected and it runs the job automatically. If I need multiple passes I select that and send the file over however many times I need it to run.

[Rodne Gold]

Copy the graphic as many times as you need passes, on top of each other , using a different colour each time , make sure the colours laser in the correct order - it should then do a multipass with the power and speed you specify for each colour.

[Norm Zurawski]

Ok, no auto start that I can see. I did do the color mapping thing. Started out with making extra copies in the same layer, but only ran once. So I created separate layers for each color. Ran it once and did what I needed. Then I tried optimizing it even further and now it only runs two colors. Not sure what I did. So now I am only getting two passes. It'll be something simple I am sure. Just have to figure it out.

[Mark Maslonkowski]

After setting up you driver on the normal print menue increase the number of copies to 4 instead of one.


Mark Maslonkowski

[Rodne Gold]

Optimising might delete overlapping lines , don't know your driver tho..

[Mike Null]

Typically, 4 copies of the same drawing in red on top of each other will get you 4 passes.

[Scott Shepherd]

I know this was an Epilog question, but just for reference for people who might search this in the future, on the Universal, if you tell it you want 4 copies of the print job (instead of 1), it will run the run job 4 times without stopping, by color. On the Trotec, in the driver, for any specific color, you can tell it how many passes you want that color to take. You can engrave with 2 passes, cut with 1, or whatever you want to do. That's in their Job Control X.

[Norm Zurawski]

Ok, tried all red colors. Put in separate layers, only would run two passes. Then moved them all to one layer, again only two passes. My hope was to be able do the whole process without resending. I did try running the 4 copies of the same circle. I know that worked because I had the auto focus on and it focused 4 times. Image is of the pocket in the same layer.268512

[Lee DeRaud]

For what it's worth, I once did this exact job and found it was much faster to use the contour tool to vector cut a set of very closely spaced circles halfway through the acrylic. There was a bit of scraping required to clean out the pocket after the fact, maybe 30 seconds with a small chisel.

[Norm Zurawski]

This project was only really to try new things to use CoralDraw and the laser. I would normally use my cnc router for something like this. I was thinking I should even try cutting the counter sinks for the screws using your method. All that matters is I learned stuff. I think this is why I have these tools, challenges me and I get to make stuff others can't.