pricing a vector job

[sal shepherd]

I need to quote a vector cutting job. The material is 1/8 plexi or abs. He will pay for material. I will have to cut down to 24x24. Than vector cut pieces out, the objects are rectangles with radius corners. 1st order 500-1000.
Does abs cut like plexi ? edge quality?
BTW it takes 1min 30 sec to cut 1 the max I can cut at one time is 6

[Scott Shepherd]

ABS does not cut like plexi. You might want to make sure you know which one before quoting it.

[Doug Griffith]

Yes, ABS does not cut as good as plexi. Plus it smells. One way to speed up production cutting jobs is to share edges. Sometimes it helps to lead in and out at beginning and ends of cuts. For six rectangles, you'd share 7 edges.

[sal shepherd]

Yes, ABS does not cut as good as plexi. Plus it smells. One way to speed up production cutting jobs is to share edges. Sometimes it helps to lead in and out at beginning and ends of cuts. For six rectangles, you'd share 7 edges.

Doug
I haven't tried sharing edges, these rectangles have rounded corners.How do you set art work up to share edges? The customer wants plexi.

[Tim Bateson]

The way I would do it is place your 6 round cornered squares tightly against one another. Change the color of every other square - this really helps. Now cut away any lines that touch from every other square. Then Group everything together - this will keep every piece in the right spot if you were to move it.

For small jobs this isn't worth the time, but for 500-1000+, I'd say it would be time well spent.

[Joe Pelonio]

As a general rule of thumb figure charging twice the acrylic rate for ABS. Tell them this in advance and hopefully they will stick to the acrylic.

[Doug Griffith]

Tim's method is about how I'd do it. Sometimes I take it one step further and optimize the line directions so there is as little non-cutting movement as possible. When cutting thousands of items, seconds add up quick.

[sal shepherd]

I tried to remove the lines, knife tool,trim,intersect. what is the key of setting this up?

[Kevin Groenke]

You'd be crazy not to share lines.
Six rectangles = seven single lines instead of 24 lines if individual parts. To radius the corners, the number of fillets is the same regardless of how it's drawn.

In acad, to do this you make a rectangle, fillet the corners, make an array, OVERKILL the file to eliminate duplicates and join line segments, then cut. Sometimes acad is a pain, but there are some functions that are fantastic - OVERKILL is one of them.

-kg

[Rodne Gold]

Be careful when sharing lines cos the best quality you will get is when the radiused rectangle is cut in one go - sharing often makes the laser jump around , ie it cuts a line then a radius etc - you might get a less than stellar piece with a little notching at the corners due to small alignment errors due to expansion/contraction of the pex , especially when cutting at slow speed and high power - the laser puts a lot of heat into the material and it does expand and warp a little. Depends on how fussy your customer is about this.
If you dont share lines and go for discrete single cuts - then also be careful of spacing these too close to one another as the thin sections between em also tend to warp - even worse with ABS than pex , and this can make life difficult.