Thoughts on Deskproto/Mini Review

[Ijhammo]

Hi Chris,

your mini review was a real find as I have been struggling with the CAM piece.

i only got in to machining at the beginning of the year when I bought a sherline lathe and mill to support my model building hobby. I looked at some of the parts in the model and thought "I can make these better". I made a few bits by hand and quickly came to the conclusion that to get the finish I really wanted I would need to go CNC.

A few weeks ago I bought the CNC kit for my sherline mill, including the 4th axis rotary table. So far I have got it hooked up to Mach3 and can control the stepper motors nicely. For CAD I am using ViaCAD Pro9 as I had an early version and could upgrade cheaply :-)

the CAM piece has been trickier as it seems to be the limiting factor in the complexity of the pieces you can make. The hobby level pricing tends to lead to restricted features compared to something like SolidCAM which is $15k for multi axis!! (Ie very much not hobby!)

my other challenge is feed and speeds for the very small parts I need to make - I will be using tiny cutters for the fine details (1mm and smaller) and I can't get any good data on the rates to use.

thanks again for the tips

ian