Anyone who has worked with a laser-cutter will probably have story about just how dire the software for them tends to be. HPC Laser cutters are very nice machines but they still come with LaserCut 5.3 which has had no updates to my knowledge in 4-5 years. It is the only piece of dongle protected software I have and it is frankly awful. The interface looks like something produced in the mid-90s and the English language options look like Google translate was used. I have learnt my way around the interface but there are somethings which are really hard to control. The path planning algorithm is completely inscrutable and appears to have no logic I can understand. Usually this doesn't matter too much as the only impact is inefficient print times but I got caught up with a completely different issue with my goods shed rear wall.

It doesn't show up too well in the photographs but you can see that while the brickwork at the top and bottom looks ok the area in the middle, apart for one band of about 6 courses , looks rather weak. I thought it was a fault on the cutter and cut the part again but it came out with the same effect. The drawing was fine, it was just the way the LaserCut software had arranged the cut path.

Watching the cutter it appeared that the 'good' parts of the brickwork had each vertical mortar line cut as an individual movement. Where the cut looked good the cutter tended to cut a single mortar line and then move diagonally and cut the next one. Where the brickwork looked bad the planning algorithm had cut an entire vertical line of mortar in on pass, pulsing the laser on and off as it went. While the later approach is more efficient in terms of print time the way the head runs continuously rather than starting and stopping on each line  makes the cut not as deep.

It really doesn't seem that there is anyway to control this so I simply had to take part of the drawing that printed ok and use it to replace the mortar lines on a 'broken' bit. The result then looks identical it just has the lines drawn in a different order in the DXF file. I kept importing the file from TurboCAD into LaserCut and running the preview option. I was watching for, and then trying to loose, the continuous vertical movements. The result looks so much better.

Comparing the entire walls side by side and you can really see the difference.

This was all a bit of an unnecessary PITA. Typically I had no problem with the opposite wall or the end walls, or indeed with the station building. I think it must just have been the order in which I copied mortar lines vertically as I produced the drawing.  At least I now know what to look for in future.

I can now move on to assembling the main buildings and have fun with the corner buttresses.

David