(Another?) cautionary tale

Yes, dear readers, omscaler has had to solve a rather sticky production problem. Everything started out well enough. Scan in a drawing that was done on a master drawing sheet. As a point of fact, the new drawing was of a set of locomotive cabs needed for the current project. The drawings were added to a sheet of previous drawings used for storing the same for laser cutting when needed. The scan went well as usual. Then the idea of copying and pasting the new cab drawings from the master file to a new blank file was done. No problem. The cab drawing was “cleaned up” (more on that in another post). Then pasted into the laser cutting file. The laser was readied. The cut was started. Then something strange happened. Omscaler noticed that the cut time seemed unusually long. Not good. When the same was finished, the finished cab side was huge. Looked four times larger than it needed to be. What went wrong? Omscaler began to investigate. All looked well. Let’s try another cut. This time span seemed better. The finished cut was too small. A night’s sleep was planned to avert frustration. The next day, a plan was tried to clean up the cab drawings “in situ”. Then just one drawing was transferred to the laser cut file. The cut turned out on spec. Oh happy day. Then the rest were done correctly as well. What caused the original dimensional deviation? Omscaler does not know. Since we found a solution, we will repeat what works in the future. Sticking to the plan, omscaler