Thread: DraftSight dxf Problem

The Men's Shed Router previously described is operating reliably and we are slowly getting suggestion/requests for odd jobs.

I tried to make a simple tabbed box as a demo of what we could do and used DraftSight CAD to originate the design, saved as a 2012 dxf ASCII file, opened with dxf2gcode (a free code generator) to be told that the drawing had 'elements smaller than the tolerance'.

Checked the conversion tolerance - 0.001 mm.
Went back to the drawing and made all the parts into blocks, still no joy.
The 2x sides and 2x ends code Ok, but the bottom would not.
Laboriously copied the bottom as a polyline on a different layer and erased the old bottom, still no joy.
Looked at the dxf produced, it is readable, probably understandable, but at 165 kB and 25,000 lines in Notepad that did not seem the way to go.

I took the dxf to the Shed and opened with CamBam (we now have a licenced copy).
No problems.

I opened the DraftSight produced dxf with LibreCAD (another freeby), looked at the drawing, then saved it as a different dxf file.
Now it codes fine.
Suggestions as to what DarftSight puts in a dxf file that causes problems with gcode generation by dxf2gcode gladly received.

John

Correction: the dxf file was R12 ASCII, not 2012.