Building My First CNC Router, Looking for Advice & Other Info

[AlexDoran]

Well guys it may not look like much, but it was a fair amount of working getting to this point:



My Solidworks package updated to 2018 in the last few days, 2018 Professional now comes included with Solidworks CAM - Which is essentially CAMWorks. I spent a lot of time yesterday and today wrapping my head around creating a Post Processor for the DDCSV1.1 to use with CAMWorks, setting up the machine and figuring out tool creation in CAMWorks etc.

As far as CAMWorks goes its a fantastic bit of software, i can just stay in Solidworks and open up the tab, click a button to recognise machinable features and then go from there, once i enter a few more tools into the Machine that are available to use, it will pick out the most suitable tool for the job and generate the tool paths. After this you can visualise them and make any changes etc.

Still need to make some changes to the Post Processor and CAMWorks settings to streamline the whole process but so far its no where near as challenging as i thought it would be.

Now i need to figure out and start researching good ways to reference origins on the machine, i see a lot of people work to the centre of parts, need to do some research on this.

Also looking to get a probe and figure that out with DDCSV1.1.

Thanks

Alex