Krabzcam & 4x8 sheet limitations

I’ve been digging Krabzcam, it seems so intuitive and straightforward! That said, I’ve run into a conundrum and I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the best way to proceed.

I have some DXFs that use the entire 4x8 sheet and were designed around either lasers or some other close-to-zero kerf cutter. I’ve gotten around this problem in the past by manually shaving the 6.35mm or so off each part to manually add an area that Krabzcam will be able to use for profile exterior because 1/4" here or there is fine for this furniture, but with this file, I don’t have a place where I can do that for some of the parts and Krabzcam won’t let me select just the lines I want for insider/outside profiles because (as best as I can tell) it has to be able to find a manifold solution for a shape so it knows where inside is vs outside.

I thought about shoving cut variables into the ENGRAVE function but I realized that woul do exciting things to the notches where the 1/2" plywood is supposed to slot together.

If you saw a file like this, what would you suggest? Do you hear any bad assumptions in my writeup that I don’t know I don’t know?

Thanks!

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DXF files are handled a bit different than svg in KrabzCam.
When a DXF is imported it will try to tie loose ends together based on endpoint proximity.
Sounds like this is what’s causing problems here, it gets confused about which segments belongs together…
In this case it would probably work better if you convert the design to svg before importing it into KrabzCam.

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It behaves the same when I load it as an SVG as well, I think it’s still trying to guess what’s inside and what’s outside but this style of drawing uses every piece of the 4x8 sheet. I appreciate the idea and again, really dig the client, I am thinking this is a tricky nut to crack and I just can’t wrap my head around how to do it yet.

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I think if there was a way to manually select a single line and tell it ‘you’re an inside and this is the inside side’ then I could go through and manually set the internal cuts and then the straight down the middle cuts using engrave, but it’s too darn smart I think. :slight_smile:

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I guess I misunderstood a bit. This design does probably not consist of closed loops to begin with, since it is made for laser cutting.

Maybe you could try to save it as a big bitmap, and then use a fill-tool in gimp (or photoshop or something) to fill each region with different colors. Then you can import the bitmap into inkscape and trace it into vector again…

something like this:
image

Just an idea… I guess it depends on how accurate you want it and so on…

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That sounds very neat, I will give it a try. Thanks!

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