XTool Learning Curve

It’s been six weeks since the XTool came into the house, but I’ve had little time to play with it. Until this evening, the maple leaf remained the only product.

I can only use one basswood maple leaf around the house. What I really want are cores for rolling stock and buildings. This means ironing out a workflow and settings for moving between OnShape and the tool itself.

It turns out to be quite easy. Simply export the surfaces to be cut from OnShape as DXF. Then upload them into the XTool Creative Space. I tend to work in inches, so I had to set the XTool software to inches to avoid having to re-size the shapes as I imported them.

This corner was a test of offsets to accommodate the thickness of the laser beam. Honestly, all of the alternatives are much better than I could do with hand tools in the two minutes it took to fabricate this test piece. However, moving both faces of the join .08mm toward each other yielded the tightest joint.

3 thoughts on “XTool Learning Curve

    1. Being Canadian, we are squashed between metric and imperial. Many of the materials I use are in imperial units, and the 1900’s source information is always imperial. Working in metric, though, is much easier on the old arithmetic lobes.

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