DXF output for Wire EDM

[admacon]

I tried searching the site for DXF and also Wire EDM and just EDM and couldn't find anything at all on DXF which is suspicious as I saw DXF referenced in numerous posts while I was looking through things...and with Wire EDM I got a lot of hits with "wire" but nothing with EDM, also nothing at all with just EDM. Hopefully I am in the right area...

I am new to Gearotic and am trying to get it all figured out.. I created some gears as a reverse engineer project for a customer and when I output as a DXF to put into my CAM system, it outputs with about 99billion segments instead of any arcs etc. the issue is that on my machine, when it is trying to do very short segments near and inside corner it causes cutter comp interference issues on the machine and it overcuts gouging the face. it only does it at the root of the external gear I am cutting and as I get closer to the finish pass, it is better, but not great. I am trying to see if there is some parameters I am not seeing for how it outputs the gear profile. Like a maximum segment length or converting some to arcs etc. I am also reaching out to my CAM support to see what they can to do clean things up. Hoping this is an easy fix in at least one of the softwares.

Matt.

[ArtF]

Hi Matt:

DXF has always been troublesome due to the large segment counts in the lines. Splines and such in DXF when Gearotic was written were very hard to deal with. What I tend to do is save the DXF in Gearotic. Then open it in Vexx. In the settings for Vexx, you can select two version of Autocad, select the newest. Select the gear outline in the dxf, and then select the Lines->Arcs selection. This will tend to reduce the segment count by quite a bit depending on the "tolerance" setting in the settings. The tolerance will determine the fit of the arcs. Save that new dxf and you should find fewer lines.

Regards,
Art