Newbie 😊

Hey guys,

New to the site and hoping to get some advice for when I get stuck as no doubt it’ll happen, abit about me I’ve been a maintenance engineer for 10 years now in the industrial side of things so I have a good understanding of how a CNC works but the programming side I’ve never touched, starting to get the itch to build a CNC for myself to do projects an help with repairs, I’m looking to make the frame out of steel as I’m confident in working with it and I don’t like the aluminium builds as they are abit too plug an play to me, got a few ideas bouncing around at the moment and going to draw it up in solidworks so I’ll post that as soon as I’ve done it and get ready for the advise afterwards lol

Hope to keep on track an maybe next year have a fully working machine

Hi and welcome to the forum. Looking forward to seeing your designs and what you come up with. When you are ready start a build log to keep all the questions etc in one place.

Good luck with the build.

Welcome to the forum.

Once you get the CNC itch there's no going back. Post up some ideas, have a look around the build logs, and let us know what you want the machine to do.

On the programming side you can write gcode manually to control the machine but these days there are very good CAD and CAM packages which will do that for you. Then there are machine controllers which takes the gcode generated by the CAM software and move your machine around. Mach3 and LinuxCNC are popular as somewhere to start.

Good luck with it and be prepared to develop the design based on the hard won experiences of the forum members.

There is usually someone who has been there and done that for just about anything DIY CNC related