hi

my names paul, I am a silversmith living in the uk.
I have 30+ years experience in metalworking and cad and 10 years cnc and cam experience.

I have two small cnc machines in my workshop which I have built new controllers for both running mach3. plus other conventional machines Colchester lathe, thiel mill ,j&s surface grinder, dowling toolgrinder ,alexander die sinker and a kearns horizontal borer plus bandsaw drill press polisher etc

my interest is in machining dies for metal stamping , mainly in silver
and making models in silver .i use bobcad v26 and vectric vcarve amongst a host of other 3d modelling programs , like blender , hexagon and rhino.


I model the dies in blender and export as dxf, then import to autocad to convert to iges files, which can be read by bobcad as surfaces to toolpath.i have also modelled by hand and used a pix-3 scanner to 3d scan for machining.

hoping to glean a few extra ideas from the forum to build a 4th axis for my mill. and maybe to upgrade my tiny connect lathe.