[bbulich]

Hey All

I have been making a certain part for a couple years by hand and wanted to up my production. SO I bought a new patriot a few months ago, in order to help with production. I am very new to cnc machining although I have been doing a lot of reading here and there. I have also taken a while to get familiar with the machine.

The product will be made of a composite acrylic material and will need a slightly complicated program to produce it..I assume. The part is small, curved and has an o-ring.

Is there a cad program someone can reccoment that is free or inexpensive that will allow me to draw this part out in order to convert it to g-code. I have a copy of autocad, but it seems pretty complex for what I want to do.

Any reccomended starting point would be appreciated

[tropopv]

I code all my parts by hand with a little help from the Mach 3 wizards for things like threading. It's not especially difficult to do honestly. I had no machining or CNC experience prior to purchasing my Patriot and was making parts about a week after setting it up. Read the manual, do a bit of research and you should be good to go.



But if you're really not interested in learning Gcode, then there are some inexpensive CAM programs out there like CamBam. You'll need to draw it in CAD first (some CAM progs have built in CAD) and then follow the process for coverting to gcode.

In my opinion, for the vast majority of parts, learning gcode is less complicated, quicker, cheaper and more satisfying.