Any CNC mill owner/operators here?

[Charles (Upstate NY USA)]

I just ordered a bench mill/drill (700 pound Fong Fu 45 clone) and CNC retro-fit kit for my coil building hobby and to redesign my Explorer for underwater use...well plus on a cool tool scale of 1 to 10 this CNC stuff ranks a 9.8 :-)

Anway I wonder if anyone has a favorite CNC CAD/CAM software? Theres about 40 different packages out there from $99 to $25,000 and I am considering OneCNC Mill Professional. I'll be doing 3D modeling which OneCNC will do. $2,000 is about my max budget for software. Thanks.

[FJ]

Re: Any CNC mill owner/operators here?

I draw in Autocad 2004 and then import those into Mach1 from www.artofcnc.ca. Its the only decent Windows based controller that I've found. Its cheap to.
Good luck,
FJ

[Radioactive]

Home built CNC Machines

Charles,
There are a lot of CNC to choose from that you can build up yourself.
Here are a few links:

First I have been receiving Nuts & Volts for about 20 years now and many home built CNC machines. I built one out of a used Drill Press, and a XY table with stepper moters. I also used a simple Forth Software. I also use Autocad because it already has the vector software built in. My frind built a simple small one out of an HP plotter!! The best to work with is Corel because it has 3D and drill size to use in the vector portion. Here is the link to NV but recently the have a spinoff SERVO or Robots mag. A lot of nice BAS software that can be cut and built to use on a CNC. Take a look here:
http://www.nutsvolts.com
http://www.ktmarketing.com/CNC.html (LOOK AT HIS LINKS)
http://www.havingasoftware.nl/robots/cnc/cnc.htm

Some commercial stuff and software for CNC's as FJ stated:
(this is a great one, the Parallax STAMP)
http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/r...g_to_metal.asp
Here is another
http://www.timgoldstein.com/secure/eStore/
The well known BobCAD-CAM, Inc software here in Florida.
Take a look at his Hobby ProSoftware
(Price $295.00, seems to be in your price range)
http://www.bobcad.com/

Hope that helps,

Robert

[Charles (Upstate NY)]

I ended up going with OneCNC XR Professional at (gulp) $4,500 ouch! But its been a fantastic CAD/CAM tool.