MakerCam Pocket problem

Hi all, I’m having trouble with an SVG in makercam. All the letters apart from the ‘i’ seem to work fine for a pocket operation, for some reason with the same settings as the other letters the ‘i’ only gets an outline cut…

Does anyone know why this might be happening?

The font was changed to outlines before being saved as an SVG from illustrator so should be a closed path.

Pics attached
Pic 1
Pic 2

Before saving as an SVG be certain to combine everything into a composite path and to correct path direction.

Can you elaborate for me how to do that please Will?

I’m afraid that I fix this sort of thing in Freehand.

For Inkscape the relevant commands seem to be:

  • Path | Union
  • Path | Combine
  • Path | Reverse — if you’re certain of the direction being wrong, outermost path is counter-clockwise, next is clockwise, alternating — fill is always to the left side of the path.

I’m not sure it’s the same problem we are talking about…

I have 2 words, in 2 different fonts, above and below each other. When I open the SVG in Makercam, I can create pocket operations for all the individual letters without a problem, apart from the ‘i’ in ‘tequila’. For some reason when I hit ‘calculate’ all the letters show internal tool paths that will create a pocket, but the ‘i’ doesn’t work, and just shows a single tool path going around the letter - almost like a ‘follow path operation’

Another thing is sometimes the machine will just freak out on a path (which it has already made 4 identical pockets for on the same work piece) and just plunge the bit all the way to the bottom until the spindle shuts off…

When I ran the gcode NC file in a simulator like OpenSCAM it looked fine.

Is there any other decent CAM software out there for mac?

Hi Will, I replied to you on the other forum. The file is here, but after replacing the ‘i’ and touching nothing else, now the “t” has the problem the “i” had before. Confused.
SVG
(File will be deleted from server soon)

Answered there, and will look at the file when I have a moment.