Fiber Rotary

[Bill George]

So, after delaying as long as I could learning the Rotary. today was the day.
I did download and print all the posts I could find here on the Engravers Forum.

Its finally dawned on me after a day of frustration and after I shut the machine down, that all text and graphics to send to the Rotary need to be split. The split tells the stepper when to rotate X number of steps to the next location. So am I on the right track or not?

[Kev Williams]

Yes-- what you have to decide is how far you think the laser will stay in focus across the arc you're engraving on.

There IS a neat feature, the "rotary textmark"- if you're engraving only text around the circumference of your part, the rotary automatically engraves one letter at a time, then moves. It's one part of fiber rotary-ing that works great! It's getting graphics to join together seamlessly that's the trick.

first time I used mine, it engraved every split in the reverse order, similar to mirror imaging...the engraving wasn't mirror imaged, just the engraving order was! - the problem was that running in the Y axis, with the chuck pointing to the RIGHT, "invert" in the settings was unchecked. My original backwards engraving was because the machine assumed the chuck was pointing to the LEFT, so the rotation was reversed... the fix was simply to click the "invert" box...

[Bill George]

I am getting my rotary running Thank You guys, and one quick question.

Doing the splitting on a graphic what does Split Size mean? I have it set on 1 and I can add all the splits I want, just wondering?

It works fine, using both the Rotary Text and standard Rotary modes.

[Kev Williams]

Split size is the distance around the circumference on the part surface that the machine engraves within, AND moves--
Here's a Corel thing I just drew up, and it's to scale- This first pic depicts a 2" diameter part, this is looking across the top.
To make this easy I'm doing the split 'as the crow flies' rather than around simply because it's easier to draw :) (and it's pretty close anyway)
Note the guidelines are 1mm apart. As you can see this is pretty close, so I went to 4mm. Corel says the distance between the
high point and low points spanning 4mm is 0.8mm, which is about .030" inch, which should be within decent focus range.
So the machine will engrave exactly within the blue 4mm area----
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--then it'll move--


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--and engrave the next 4mm area, shown in green... and so on and so on...

Notice the seam between the blue and green boxes? That's pretty much what actually happens, it's the seam everyone complains about that everyone complains about. Gary seems to have the fix :)

NOW, as for the split lines, when using them, the machine will engrave between them and move to the next one, disregarding the 'Split Size' you've entered.
NOTE that there's a choice for this, you have to check the "Mark by split line" box, like this is, otherwise it will use the Split Size.
ALSO NOTE that you need to keep the split lines reasonably close together or the laser can go out of focus at the low ends---
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Hope all this makes sense! :D

[Bill George]

Got it. So its either or, I just added splits where it looked like a likely place and still pretty close together and it looked ok, at least on the very small image. Tomorrow will be another day. Thanks Again!!!

[Kev Williams]

The great thing about splits is being able to put them where there's no, or very little engraving, to minimize seam issues.