Cutting lines close together

I want to cut a bunch of hexagons from plywood. The drawing is made in a CAD program and the easiest way to draw it is to create a hexagon and place copies. This will result in 2 lines in the same place. Will the cloud software recognize this and only cut once or will it go ahead and make the same cut twice? If the software will remove the second cut line how far apart do cuts have to be for them both to be made?

Auto detection of duplicate lines would be a really nice feature; however, you should develop good design practices anyway, as you might not always be fabricating on a machine as smart as the GF.

If you use Rhinoceros 3D you can use the “SelDup” command to automatically select then delete duplicate lines.

Hope that helps!

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I would expect that the software would do as it’s told and cut each line. If you want to only cut a single line, you should remove duplicates in you CAD before export. In Rhino it would be (! _SelDup _Delete).

fablab_elpaso Cross post :slight_smile: Funny! We are on the same page.

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You don’t only have to worry about overlap of lines. Depending on the program you are using, lines completely underneath other filled shapes can still be sent to the laser with a cut command. I believe Shapeoko had a PDF which gave some examples where visually two areas of shapes overlayed like a hand of cards were the same, but sent to the laser one would come out how you see it, and the other one would be in multiple chunks since each individual card would still cut a full outline (through the rest of the cards in the hand)

Thanks for the suggestions but, my cad, turbocad designer, does not have duplicate line removal, the shape is more complex than a hexagon so there will be literally thousands of duplicate lines, the two lines are both cuts and I don’t want both cuts made.

The tiles are rotated when placed so I can not just draw it with some lines left out. Probably will build an object mace up of several tiles of a size that it does not have to be rotated and then remove duplicates in it and remove lines on the edge so when placed there are no duplicates.

Running into this issue as it relates to materials, laser focal point and design platform. Part of the packing/nesting issue we have talked about before. Good topic to expore.

You could try Adobe Illustrator. It has a function to simplify vectors to remove redundant paths (which would remove overlapping lines ideally).

For anyone drafting in AutoCAD, the command for removing duplicate lines is “Overkill”.

https://turbocaddoc.atlassian.net/wiki/display/TMP/Remove+Duplicates

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We don’t have any code to remove duplicate lines yet but it’s definitely something in the hopper.