Well, while I did get them all completed on the first try, I don’t want to make it sound like there weren’t issues.
Luckily, the mistakes I made didn’t ruin my parts.
I do have some extra holes and stuff in places outside of where my parts were though…
Some of the prep I did because I was scared of ruining my sheet helped a lot in being able to save myself a few times.
Yes your well thought out placement and all is a huge time saver and screwup saver lol. Good job!
For this section here. The easiest way for me to find where to put this…
Open the .gcode file in windows notepad
Click Edit - Find
Type: Part
Click find next. It will take you straight to the first part operation, which is usually the last operation in Estlcam. There is a single line gap just above it and that’s where I put mine. I do my code a little different but that doesn’t matter in the end.
Thanks for pointing that out. I did the same.
After exporting the file, I would leave EstlCAM on the Preview so I could easily see the order and know exactly what text to search when I had multiple places I wanted to add them
Excellent!
I do mine in this order except I put the 1/16th at the end, that way most of the material is gone, and this is just cleaning up corners.
I did use your DXF organization method. It does help a lot and when I did for get a toolchange I was able to go back and just do the small logo cut and it was flawless. Excellent tip!
Yeah he waited till I had already started to share that tidbit LOL.
I think I would have done it opposite though. I only use the 16th for the real small logo cut outs. So I would have just done the entire plate worth of those from the get go as one job. That’s what I am thinking about doing with my redo anyways LOL
As I got towards the end and was doing bigger batches, that was how I was doing it.
All of the 1/16" stuff first, then all the drill holes. Pause. batches of 1/8" holes, then each part with a pause in between.
With your faster settings and it being possible to do it in a reasonable amount of time, breaking it up by small holes and drills, then all of the bigger stuff, you should have 2 manageable halves of time where if you need to step out at the pause you’d be fine to
That’d be a lot of screws and pads though lol
I have plenty of screws lol. But only printed 12 washers. But that’s just a quick print to get more! Laying mine out now then will see how many more I need to do it that way
Plumbers washers at box store would work well also!
https://www.homedepot.com/p/Everbilt-Assorted-Rubber-Flat-Faucet-Washers-24-Pieces-in-Black-866850/318763607
There are a couple of benefits, in my opinion, to using the printed ones if you have a 3D printer and can make them
Did you ramp into the material, or just do a straight plunge?
With Trochoidal it does a spiral plunge down. No need to do an angle plunge. Its nice and gentle. Like a helical drill function.
An end mill will cut through a rubber washer like butter. I wouldn’t worry about the size of the washer at all.
I would worry about because I don’t really want the rubber all over my bits, and because multiple $0.15 washers per cut would get expensive.
That’s roughly an extra $7 or so per sheet of MP3DP v5 parts if you cut it all at once, versus $0.30 max of printed ones that are re-usable
I used mine again to hold down polycarbonate sheet for the panels 
Here is the file for the washers I was using. AFAIK they were the same dimension’s as Mikes
Aluminum Screw Washer.zip (31.5 KB)
My assumption was that the cut would only cut the edge of the washer and shave it down closer to the size of the bolt head. The washer would still work fine with a majority of the outside edge missing.
You could even chuck it onto a bolt in a drill or drill press and sand it down to the size of the bolt head first if you wanted.
I think the jist of the initial link was just to offer an alternative. I don’t think it was meant to put down your 3d printed washer. I’m sorry if my comment offended you.
It doesn’t offend me, I was just offering the explanation as to why I would worry about it, in contrast to why you said that you wouldn’t.
I, of course, was not worried about whether or not the end mill “could” cut through a rubber washer, but a hot end mill in rubber does have the ability to gum up on the bit, and I wouldn’t want that to happen mid cut.
Some of those washers in that pack are pretty large, so it’s more than just shaving it down. Given the layout of the sheet and how small the clearances are between parts, it would probably be 4 full bit cuts through the rubber.
I never said it would not work, my response are listing what I see as the drawbacks to doing it.
Given the point of the thread was to help people less experienced, I wanted to make sure those thing were known.
And since the majority of people that come through here seem to have 3D printers handy, I wanted to make sure to point out that there are benefits to printing them yourself
