Riding the long yellow bus in the short yellow bus space

No Judgement
1

.here’s my problem I need to cut something that is 5ft by 10ft long. So my cutting space on the back would have to be 12 ft wide by 6 ft so the sled would not tip. At least 18 feet long top bar .After now over 20 hours of reading and watching YouTube videos I’m totally lost .on one of the videos it showed a gentleman sitting up his cut as day one day two. my thinking if you do the whole project for G-Code you just cut part of it but you add alignment holes that go into the backboard ever foot or so top and bottom. Then adding pins you could cut the front part off and move it forward to the cut the rest. That way you could do a 4-foot rolling platform . cutting as long as you want and then when you’re done just roll the cart back. On a water jet it’s called indexing. Is there a program you can dictate what it’ll cut first Then move forward on the alignment pins fasten to the backboard then cut the rest. what do you think thinking the cost saving 20 foot long to a 4 foot roll around Cutting fiberglass teardrop trailer skins

2

you want at least 3 inches on each side of the workpiece at the same thickness
as your workpiece

you want at least 6 inches below the workpiece at the same thickness as your
workpiece

you want a top beam to extent at least 2’ beyond the end of your workpiece (the
stock is 1’, but you really want more) to keep the chain angles good in the
bottom corners

the wider the workpiece the higher you will want the top beam to keep the chain
angle good in the top center (and since raising the top beam makes the angles
worse in the bottom corners, possibly go a bit wider

so a main frame area that’s 11’ wide and 5.5’ tall including the skirts around
your workpiece should be good.

a 14-15’ top beam should be ok. I’d have to play around with the spreadsheet to
figure out how high you would want to go and confirm the 15’ top beam.

you would need chains about 1’ longer than your top beam.

but I don’t see why you would need to go with a 18’ top beam

As you suspect, you can cut your CAD in parts with registration holes. The
headache with doing that is that you will really see any errors your machine
has. If you do it in one position, if you find the shape isn’t quite right, you
can tweak the CAD to compensate for the error of the machine. If you do it in
segments, this is much harder to do.

David Lang

3

thank you .David . As we pay $2.75 a square foot want to have small foot print .luckily fiberglass skins are easy to repair so I may make a smaller unit play with the software