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[A_Camera]

I said that you were more stubborn than me!

I noted that the sleeve that goes over the ball screw nut is exactly 40mm, so i was going to use these as way to get my rails parallel.

The 1605 nut sleeve I have is 40x40x52mm, that is true, but you need to use it right, which is the screw holes up, where it is 52mm wide. That is the minimum space you need to have between carriages, unless you come up with a different solution.

Yes, i have even loaded the CAD software and had a go!

I am in charge of many things in my role, including IT funnily enough.

That's good news. Which one did you try FreeCAD?

My initial impressions is that it is not overly intuitive but it is free, so will persevere and watch some more videos on it.

YouTube is full of instruction videos regarding FreeCAD and also the forum is full of useful help and advice. What I don't like is that there are several members who are very arrogant, especially towards newbies, so I never actually posted a question there and not want to be a member. I donate my money to them because I think it's a very good software so they are worth it, but I hate some of the active members because of their arrogance. In fact, I think they are just young teenager nerds, not the actual programmers. Similar to chess.com, where I am a member, some young studs are extremely arrogant, even if they are better than I am in chess, I don't like that.

Anyway, FreeCAD is not intuitive, but I have never seen a CAD software which is both capable AND intuitive. All requires some parameters to set up and the more complex things you design, the more it needs. My usual work flow is to start from a block and carve out the shape I want to make. changing the shapes is easy once you know how to do it, just change a few parameters and everything is adjusted, like it is shown in that video, where that guy models a huge 3D printer from scratch to real thing. OK, for him is easy, since he uses this sort of software on every day basis, but as Jazz says, it's not rocket science. Once you get over the first steep hill you will get going soon. The only tutorial video I ever made is this one:



I don't claim to be an expert, but a friend asked me for advice because he needed to create this shape but could not get it right, so I made this video to show him one possible way to do it. In FreeCAD some things can be done in many ways, there is no right or wrong, but he needed a quick help, so I showed him my quick way for this simple thing.

Easel was easy and i was creating projects within 10 minutes that looked really good.

I will also pester A Camera as he uses it

I have never used Easel and probably never will. Never the less, even if it is easy to carve out something, you must still tell the software all the things about your machine. Even F-Engrave (100% free forever) is simple and can indeed carve out things for you from DXF or image files, but you must tell the software some things about your machine because it does not have any idea about your machine, tools, depths, speeds and so on. Also, if you carve an image file you must tell the size of the file, because a bitmap image is not containing real object data.