Piercings and leads

In the bottom of this article you'll find an xml file with leads we use here at IGEMS. It's free and you can copy it into the your lead library in the shared folder.

To understand piercings we must first understand the material we are going to pierce.

Brittle materials
Materials such as glass or ceramics will easily crack under high pressure. Therefore a pre piercing is often the best solution. When using pre piercing, the machine will pierce at a different pressure than it uses for cutting. This will prevent the material from cracking.

Note! To save your pump and high pressure parts, pre pierce as much as you can in one go. 

Sandwich materials
Sandwich materials such as carbon fiber can easily delaminate when pierced. Using our circular piercing is one way to go about it, but using a drilling unit is absolutely the best and safest way to pierce.

Both brittle and sandwich materials can be predefined with these settings in the material database and use pre piercing/drilling as piercings when using automatic leads in the contour command.

Homogeneous materials
Most other materials such as metals and plastics can use piercings from our piercing list. But even here you might want to tailor the piercing and leads to specific situations. For instance, the circular and linear piercings are absolutely the fastest piercing types, but they take up more space than a blind piercing. So if your material is extremely expensive or if there's not enough room, you might want to consider the blind lead. The image below describes our different piercings types. Blue lines display rapid movements and green lines displays cutting.

The low speed and extra fine quality speed can be found in the material settings.

Dimple
When you're cutting something you are going to weld and want to make sure there are no tags left at the lead in/out position, a dimpled lead is a good choice. You'll find it in the lead settings.