Teaching myself CNC (with the help of YouTube University) so it is probably something I am doing but.
I drew a bracket this morning with Simple Trace, just one hole and the outside shape. Started with the circle, entered diameter and Right Cut. The entry was on the inside, right. Then went to draw the outside shape and selected Left Cut and the entry was on the inside. That does not sound right. Changed to Right Cut and the entry is now on the outside where it belongs but when I do a dry run both cuts still go counterclockwise. I don’t remember It doing this when I first got it a month or two ago.
I have now traced the bracket a several dozen times and found a few things. The hole is always correct. When I go to trace the outside perimeter, if I trace it going clockwise, everything is fine but if I trace it going counterclockwise, it is like it confuses it. Usually, I have to select right cut to get the lead in on the outside but then it cuts it counterclockwise. A couple times it even looked right in Simple Trace but when I closed Simple Trace and tried to dry cut, the lead in went back to the inside on the part. Just never know what it is going to do.
Maybe a software glitch? Maybe this is correct, but I have not seen anybody say anything about the direction to go when you are tracing.
If you think about it Left and Right are related to what direction you trace things. So IN/OUt change.
Walk in a CCW circle with your left hand out. And then Do it again CW…
The ArcDroid will rebuild all your data before cutting to try and optimise a bit so it may cut in a differnt direction you traced (at least on closed shapes). But it should keep the Kerf offset on the side shown onthe screen
Thanks for the reply @Andrew. I get what you are saying about CCW and CW. To be honest the part I was trying to cut, the outside dimension was not important, and I did not measure to see which side of the line it was on. The biggest thing was the lead-in being on the wrong side. For the outside cut sometimes, I would enter left cut and the lead-in would be on the outside and sometimes it would be on the inside (ruined part). If it was on the inside I could go back and change it to right cut and then it would be on the outside. At least once I noticed after changing left cut to right cut to get the lead-in on the outside I would get out of the Simply Trace page back to the cut page to try a cut, (actually just a marker by now as I was wasting to much steel), it had changed it back to the lead-in on inside. It seems too always work right if I trace in the direction I want to cut, CW for the outside cut.
It will be a couple of weeks before I can do some more experiments, I am getting ready for surgery tomorrow.
