Hi I'm looking to do a horse head in a oval frame that says either The Browns or Mr and Mrs Brown in cursive inside it I do have the lettering if you want to just to the border that would be awesome to anything would help at this point I recently bought a bunch of clip art and when I use them separately they work perfect on my CNC plasma Torchmate cutter but when I used a horse head and put an oval around it, it inverts the cut path to the inside like to where the pieces would fall out if that makes since. PS I use torchmate CAD lite I have a pic of a horse just as an idea this one doesn't have to be the one used just kind of the direction I was going in and this is not the clip art i'm using just a pic I had on my computer Thank you
First, for sheet metal, you have to have a shape that is one-piece all connected. The horse shown is not one-piece, the eyelid and eyebrow isn't touching anything, so that would never work like that for cutting it out of any free-standing sheet material, because those loose parts would fall out Once you have a one-piece design, then it depends on if the design is a single outline (silhouette) or if it has any holes (stamp) If no holes, a pure silhouette, it can form a solid shape or inside any solid boundary, it forms a hole with a border or inside and touching any hollow boundary, it forms a solid with a border However, if the shape has any holes (sub-shapes), then it is (what I call) a stamp, (not a pure silhouette), it can be cut out as a solid one-piece part But, if placed inside a solid boundary, it forms shapes inside of a hole, that works fine for vinyl cutting and routing, it does not work for jet cutting sheet metal because the innermost shapes (red) are inside a hole, not touching anything, nothing to hold them in place, not a one-piece part, not a silhouette or stamp If placed inside of (and touching) a hollow boundary, then it does form a one-piece part (a stamp), does work for sheet metal When placing a shape inside a hollow shape, where they overlap (grey) the overlap must be rmoved by joining the overlapping shapes into one The horse silhouette is the same as the letter Z (no holes), and the horse stamp is the same as the letter B (has two holes). Letters are no different than shapes, when placing them inside of other shapes see this thread and this thread and this thread for potentially helpful related examples (in HD, expand video to full screen for clarity) torchmate has similar functionality but uses different terminology and procedures for the same result
